CONTACTScontemporary jewellery and textiles

Opening speech by Kinga German:

Loneliness Soldered into Material

Here today 24 artists open up a slice of themselves and share with us, revealing their sublimated observations, feelings, thoughts, technical knowledge and tastes. If we take the invitation seriously, if we are willing to look, to observe, to try to experience what is on display in this space, we are already wandering between warp and weft, found objects, moulded materials, geometric patterns and naturalistic motifs and we have to navigate between them. Not an easy undertaking, even for the uninitiated. Yet we can find extraordinary stories told, referenced or deliberately left open. So let us try.

At first glance, there are two genres. Textile works and jewellery. On the walls materials, mainly woven or printed textiles hang at equal distances from each other and are more or less the same size. 6 to 6 textile hangings are on each side. The presence of 12 textile artists. These are accompanied above the black piano by a collage of fine yarns and torn units compacted into two coloured squares by Szilvia Vereczkey. She is the 13th artist. A further hanging textile and a projection emerge from the rear space, their identical pattern sets optically and op- artically vibrant, indicating that they are the work of one artist. Gwendoline Zimonyi. 14. Along the central axis of the space on 5 tables there are always two artists' works. In summary: we've got it! We have found the works of all 24 artists! If you thought you could make do with that, you were wrong.

We need to get closer to the works, because only then can we really understand the materials, the structure, the texture, the colours of the individual elements on display. The common point is that each of the works requires close-up viewing, while the textiles, which are built up from larger, geometric forms, they already act as paintings from a distance. Szilvia Szigeti, founder of the Eventuell Gallery and one of the main organisers of Boundless Design has received major commissions from IKEA or other international clients. Here, the red circular shapes of her work set in squares are subtly shaded with yellow, orange or light green circular slices, while the corners between the circle and the square are purple or light blue and the other side is tonally orange. They playfully take you into a never-ending dance of hard edges and concrete art.

Viola Balázs's textiles full of larger, recognisable motifs, knick-knacks and flat designs of bygone worlds also have an independent impact. She designs for utility items, scarves, clothes, backpacks, likes to design thematically, collaborates with Dori Tomcsány or has founded a major scarf brand. (VYF). The artwork text also says a lot about her design practice. So it's also worth getting closer because well-written artwork texts help a lot in the reception process. Reading them we realise that the seemingly identical tapestries were created for different reasons and with different functions. There are so-called applied textiles and textiles that were originally created as art objects, as symbols, as sensual materials in the aforementioned image interpretation. Emilia Pájer creates the colour effects given by nature on a hand loom, while her work can be interpreted as a unique, sensual tone painting. Ágnes Kollár's water surface cut-outs have a watercolour effect.

But let's not forget: in contemporary textile art the question of function-non-function does not equate to "more" or "less" categories. In principle, many artists create validly according to several interpretative categories. Anna Regős and Eszter Söptei have it in common that their materials can function as furniture fabrics, cushion covers or other furnishing fabrics, while their common denominator is that they address questions of geometric pattern and spatiality at both theoretical and practical levels. Andrea Ruttka's curtain pattern is dynamized by an offset square grid, while she also designs for theatrical productions. Réka Csíkszentmihályi's main profile is jacquard woven, i.e. high quality home textiles, but she prefers to design complete home interiors, which even include textile napkins. Gabi V. Lőrincz's dynamic carpets and tapestries combining different weaving techniques are deservedly known, while Evelin Horváth's oasis furniture weaving impresses with its leafy flower patterns. Réka Molnár's left- and right-facing foxes looking up at us stride merrily along their own rows in a perfectly designed and executed scheme. Márta Vető's work greets us with freshness at the entrance. She has worked and is working in screen-painting and hand-painting sometimes on textile pictures, sometimes on home textiles.

Now we come to the title of the exhibition: Contacts. The Hungarian word Érintkezések also hides the touches (érint). The English version also has the word for action: acts, which the graphic designer has highlighted. In the context of home textiles we rarely talk about hidden functions. Yet we draw our curtains, cry into our cushions, cuddle and make love on them, we wrap in and out with them, pull them off each other, hide under them, cling to them, we hide our faces, our hair behind shawls, we daydream, we dance in and out from under them, we express ourselves with our colour and pattern choices, we rework our inherited textiles, we keep them or throw them away carelessly. When it comes to jewellery, of course, we're not so shy. We like to make a statement by wearing them.

There's something exciting to be gleaned from all the jewellery on display, so their creators are quite open about when they were happy or less so. Fierce emotions, abandoned experiments, found, additive compositions, technical enchantments, material rules, reinterpretable found objects, vows, inspirations from other cultures are the basis of the products that lie on the tables here. 9 pins/brooches, 10 necklaces, 3 earrings, 4 rings, 1 bracelet, 1 brush, Allah's eye and touch jewellery called galvanoplastics. Krisztián Ádám has enlarged diamond-cut shapes from stainless steel into leaf-motif pendants and pins, while on the same table Noémi Gera's actual jewellery is made with soldering iron, rolling, knotting, coiling, while they are magical like their titles: Hummingbird Soaring, Your Light on the Dark Nights, Red in the Night.

For several years now Katalin Yermakov's twin rings made of bone and ebony, which refer to centuries-old customs have been known, as well as the "surplus stories" that emanate from her composite artefacts, which are linked to Polynesian beliefs, but can be freely unfolded individually. For years Zoltán Tóth has been working with rare and noble materials, composing detailed inlay relief jewellery using the Japanese shibayama method.

Anna Börcsök's table is an exciting pushing of boundaries. She concealed parts of old paintings inside the invisible insides of recycled cans and soda cans: a hand, a face with earrings, a brush cut-out of Van Gogh's cypresses, creating Soda Necklaces, Beer and Sponge Bros. Her table-mate Luca Ujvári-Zsiga presents large metal brooch slices, handed down from generation to generation, into which the parameters of the happy places in our lives can be engraved. Where were you happy?

Patrícia Harsány responded cheerfully to the quarantine year with her Re-object series. She made alternative jewellery from found objects. She made one every day. Here, the contacts are contacts of combinations of objects, the objects are the perceived safe edges of uncertainty. Alongside them are Fanni Vékony metalworked Pond Necklace, Pond Ring and Rivers Brooch made from acid-, fire- and time-resistant mineral grindings. The theme of the cold beauty of water cast in hard material...

Many people know Orsolya Kecskés's pictogram jewellery, she loves to make "never-been-seen-beings, never-seen-objects", while she is also very passionate about organizing the Night of Jewellery. Her May brooch and Storm Cloud necklace opens up a story with very sensual details to which its title refers. At the table the passion sculptures of the young Csenge Diriszi are direct, already too direct, exhausted scenes of intimate touches, of cuddling surfaces. Perhaps they are touches that have passed, perhaps they are no longer valid, but as jewels they can perhaps be tried on again and again.

To conclude, if we are looking for a common denominator for the artists collected under the heading of "Contacts", we can choose their solitude. The solitude of creative and strong people who NEED solitude to create. The life-saving messages of creators saved in a material form, with which they might step out of loneliness...

"All your strength is
touch.
All your wisdom in the next
word.
It's not a matter of inspiration anymore. And it's not
of the beat that keeps skipping.
The monster wrapped in velvet,
that you are, is watching. And like the lake, if
among mountains, it sinks within itself".
(Sándor Halmosi: Antifonia)

The exhibition was organised in close cooperation with Texhibition and Design Without Borders and we plan to join the Night of Jewellery, which has so far only been held in Budapest in the autumn.

Related programmes:
19 March 2022, 16:00
Piano concert by Róza Radnóti in the exhibition hall, followed by a guided tour

2 April 2022 from 13:00 to 17:00
Eszter Söptei's COLOUR MIXING jewellery workshop

Curator of the exhibition: Szonja Dohnál gallery manager