Margit Szilvitzky: Finding the Square
Date: 2021.04.15 - 05.21
Vernissage: 2021.04.15. 14:00
Margit Szilvitzky’s (1931-2018) name has become inseparable from the breakthrough of Hungarian textile art and its heyday in the seventies. Artists working in this area regarded textile art as a primary, autonomous medium, and – in parallel to its emancipation from the applied arts – they addressed contemporary issues and questions arising in international art discourse. As of the 1970s, operating outside the traditional categories of high art and on the periphery of political attention, the Szombathely Biennials offered an institutional framework for experimental approaches to textile art. In addition to Gábor Attalai and Zsuzsa Szenes, Szilvitzky was also among the artists who participated in the story of the ‘new textile’ movement not only as a regular and prominent exhibitor, but also as a shaper of key events.
The exhibition entitled Finding the Square, now presented at acb Attachment, showcases a selection of Margit Szilvitzky’s textile works from the seventies. Following her early artistic period, inspired by the history of apparel, folk art and the neo-secessionist style, the artist turned to white canvases in the second half of the seventies. It was also during this time that she turned her attention to the square as Malevichian ’pure form’ (in addition to other basic geometric shapes), and to a methodology of folding that reflects the influence of Josef Albers’s paper studies. Szilvitzky’s serial works and process art pieces, which represented a shift toward minimal and conceptual art, drew her systematising and system-seeking attention not only to the examination of the sculptural potential of textiles and the possibilities of turning the two-dimensional plane into tree-dimensional space, but also to the exploration of light and shadow in relation to one another. This connects her works with a wide range of artists, including Péter Türk, András Mengyán, Simon Hantaï, Tibor Gáyor, Dóra Maurer, Vera Molnar, or Károly Hopp-Halász and Gyula Pauer.
In connection to the exhibition, the acb ResearchLab – as a new step in its endeavour to research and exhibit Hungarian experimental textile/ fibre art – is publishing a volume on the period of Margit Szilvitzky’s oeuvre from 1968 to 1988, with the support of the National Cultural Fund of Hungary (NKA).
Concurrently with the solo exhibition of Margit Szilvitzky’s works at acb Attachment – through a joint collaboration between acb Gallery and Kieselbach Gallery – a selection of works by Aranka Hübner, Klára Kuchta and Margit Szilvitzky is also on view at the Kieselbach Gallery (1055 Budapest, Szent István körút 5).
Eperjesi Ágnes: The Other Way Around
Date: 2021.04.15 - 05.21
Vernissage: 2021.04.15. 14:00
The Other Way Around is the first solo exhibition of Ágnes Eperjesi at the acb Gallery. She has been making the now presented colour photogram series since 2013, continuing her earlier works based on the colour relations.
Photogram as a medium is especially important to Eperjesi. She extends the paradigmatic role of the “direct print” in art to light as well, thereby including the medium of photogram among the sphere of anachronistic (at once archaic and current) prints, to use Georges Didi-Huberman’s term. In the case of photogram, the contact with light results in darkening, and the absence of light appears as a positive form – moreover, not only the tones, but also the colours yield their complementary pairs at the end of the process: everything is seen as the inverse of normal, putting our quotidian experience to the test. This is what the exhibition’s title refers to.
Eperjesi’s creative method also reflects on the creative process behind the exhibited photograms. In 2013, she began experimenting with folding colour light-sensitive material back onto itself – thereby fixing a colour phenomenon on the medium while also imprinting the spatiality, distortion, variability and transience of the same phenomenon. At the same time, this folding also serves as a key to the configuration of the colours that appear on the photo paper. As the artist herself phrased, she is interested in the nature of bigger changes arising from the synergy of smaller changes, as well as the possibilities that lie in turning points and recording the impression of all of these. She is interested in situations that we can observe in the midst of change, in their very transience – especially ones that are capable of self-reflection in the course of transition and change. Although she gives form to her observations of this kind using other media as well, the photogram as a medium inherently bears the possibility of representing self-reflexive processes.