Berhidi Mária (Budapest Galéria Kiállítóháza, 1966)

SHELTER It would take us far afield if I allowed myself to enter into a lengthy discussion about the enormous importance of space. Therefore, in the following I shall limit my attempt to a summary description of what Mária Berhidi's sculptural space means to us here and now. But first let the facts speak for themselves. Berhidi arranged a few sculptures in a vaulted cellar. For most of these sculptures stones have been used, collected by the sculptress and bearing the signs of mechanical interference; the remaining materials include wooden beams, as well as large-size river pebbles spread on a carpet. If we descend into this exhibition-cellar, which is closed and gives shelter like all cellars, but in the same time it is a chamber of surprises filled with unexpected nieches, openings which lead nowhere, so descending into this bomb-shelter we find ourselves in a typical late-twentieth-century sculptor's shelter. As if she was saying: give me a space anywhere in this world and I shall make it speak, I shall make the space speak in the resounding voice of stone! But when does the space resonate? When the plastic form is in perfect balance with the surrounding air and all other forms. This balance is not necessarily physical, it is rather spiritual. It has more in common with proportions and rhythms, and, say, the gravitational force. To quote well-known examples: Henry Moore's sculptures tend to burst into space from within, Giacometti s sculptures are squeezed by the surrounding space and the final form is born out of this wrestling, from this carving into one another. The attentive viewer is presented at Mária Berhidi's exhibition with the adventure of seeing her sculptures being connected to the space of the outside world. This gesture, let's call it plastic gesture, is the conquest over space, but at least an enhanced appreciation of space, a kind of vigilance, which provide people who have become tired in space an almost atavistic sensation. As I walked through the exhibition I made a few notes about the sculptural space of Mária Berhidi. These are the entries that I have come up with: endangered space, connected space, cropped space, marked space, protected space, obstacle in space. These words probably already give the notion that there is something disquieting in Mária Berhidi's space, something that makes us uncertain; these are, of course, not pleasingly rounded works she could placed next to the domestic fireplace. Even her collected stones suggest arbitrariness: pieces of stone, marred by machines - stone fragments on the borderline between the land of industry and primordial nature. They show a strange family resemblance with the stones of the cellar walls, which, although once shaped by human labour, were exposed to the ravages of time for so long that they appear almost as natural rock formations. Therefore, the works have entered into some form of a symbiosis, with the cellar as well as with one another, and did so without losing their individuality. The blade-like stone fragment hung from the dark ceiling, for example, makes a solitary sight, yet it forms a joint composition with the sharp-angled wooden construction penetrating the corridor from the side. Rather than violating space as the products of some single will of forms, these works are more like stages, or space-corner monuments - if they could speak, instead of the controlled and heroic instruction of Rilke's Apollo­torso, commanding us to "Live differently!", they would probably be content to gently suggest that we live in the space and time that is given to us. Gábor Lajta

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