Üvegszobrok (Ernst Múzeum, Budapest, 1984)

GLASS STATUES Glass: a window and a glass. Our everyday life. But also glass-marble, a small, hard and heavy ball having numbed streams of colour inside. And, of course, glass-hill somewhere near the seven seas; rather far, but still inside our world. And, glass-sound, clinking and chinking, and rattle. And, a laboratory with bright and mysterious tubes curving and bending, full of bubbling liquids. And, hot house, aquarium, mirror, glasses and lens. Transparent and fragile. Mysterious green depth being heavy and invulnarable another time, a ball can go to glance off it. Being warm it is easily malleable, even a breath can shape it. When it is getting cold only hard and noble diamond is a match for it. Fire and water. Rich, bright and clean world. Rattling waste, frightening decay, offend­ing rubbish. Miraculous beauty, cold rationality and fragile illu­sions. Polished elegance, silky softness, edges of blades, cruel shivers. Shall we go on? Both the possibilities and association can be listed long. Glass has got a spell on artists for a long time. Yet, except for stained glass windows, it was mostly used for practical purposes. Glass sculpture as such has remained a curiosity; and besides cheap (sometimes expensive) fripperies the outcome was limited in value. In Hungary, the experiment-minded György Z Gács was the first to try the possibilities of glass; he made glass-statues and not statues of glass. His prismal surfaced space-dividers, glass-metal mobiles, objects reflecting and multiplying themselves are utiliz­ing the natural beauty of this material. He is like a child, becomes amazed at this brightness, at this iridescent world of miracles. Glass, for him, is a material with which he is able to realize both real and symbolic light, a medium of human existence. The approach of Erzsébet Schaár and Tibor Vilt in the late sixties is quite different. Their initiatives were also influenced by Z Gács (who made possible for them to work in his studio with his own help) who was their close friend. It was at that time when Erzsébet Schaár reached the top of her artistic career. Her earlier, Giacometti-like compositions were replaced by figures leaning at or looking out of doors or windows. She was interested mainly in questions related to in and out, as well as to a closed, limited space. The importance of both figure and object was the same in these works. A window casement, an opening door, a chair, a cracked wall were all indicating the spot of human existence. At the same time, they are more than that, they are media of everyday life and became heroes of represen­tation having proportion, mass, relation to themselves and to the outside world fixed at once. There is nothing by chance in these situations. The wall and the chair in front of it are as final as the position of human beings in the universe. As a material, glass had arrived to Schaár at the very best time. It offered itself to express a space being limited, but still open; protected, but still defenceless. And for Schaár, other charac­teristics of glass - the shining light filling up the space, the mobile tension resulted by reflexion, the excitement of fragility, the frigh­tening danger of uncut edges - were not neutral either. Vilt seems to handle glass rather like an engineer. In his composi­tions the transparent material is serving the pure logics and dynamics of structure and movement. At the same time, he is not less Romantic than Schaár in letting stand out the richness of association mentioned here at the beginning. The square plates are arranged into lines and blocks, and this makes the shining beauty of the material speak with a certain kind of unaffected­ness. He creates balanced and architectonically closed forms that are, at the same time, carrying openly the inherent threats of the material. Mari Mészáros, the member of the younger generation, is making castings from glass that are daring even technically. Since the early sixties the use of the original proofs have become quite admitted in sculpture. The life-size castings of Segal, making an influence by the abstract features of the material (white plaster), are followed by plastic figures imitating reality with a frightful accuracy. The pushing spontaneity of these statues is present to a certain extent in the compositions of Mari Mészáros, too. By preserving the natural form glass is provoking curious snooping; it also promises the heat of flash. But, it also cools the excite­ment. Glass is shining only for itself. What is behind it that is nowhere. Zoltán Bohus was the student of Z Gács at the academy. But for him all the beauty and shining are not only possibilities for play and joy, but the material is both the subject and means of spatial research of a certain kind. (This is the attitude that has been inherited by the next generation, represented here by György Buczkó and Ágnes Kertészti.) His carefully ground and glued glass bodies with unknown purposes are suggesting objects of another planets. Inside the blocks the plates, layered on each other, are arranged into mathematical screens, then they get dissolved unnoticed in a space recalling the feverish excitement and the improbable depths of the universe. The works of Mária Lugossy are not less worked out - designed - than those of her younger colleagues. Yet, she is the realistic person whose activity, message and relation to the material are recalling the “old ones”. Her beautiful glass-metal inclusions, her forms turning towards free space and dissolving into immaterial light, her reservedly elegant structures are openly speaking about an inexplicable desperate feeling that can be closely related to Erzsébet Schaár. Péter Kovács l __ üvegszobrok címmel nyílt zeumban. crhaár Erzsébet, Ä Z: Gács György, Bohus Zoltán. Buczkó György, Lu«ossy Mária, Kerteszfi Ág­nes Is Mészáros Mari alkota­­látható válogatás. GLASS STATUES ERNST MUSEUM, BUDAPEST AUGUST 23-SEPTEMBER 23. 1984. RESPONSIBLE EDITOR: KATALIN NÉRAY DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITION AND EDITOR OF CATALOGUE: ÁGNES DOBAI CATALOGUE PLANNED BY ÁGNES GÁLÓCSI TRANSLATION BY MÁRTA SZABÓ PHOTO: GÁBOR BÁCSKAI, ZOLTÁN BOHUS, FERENC GELENCSÉR, LÁSZLÓ LELKES, JÁNOS WAHR MAHIR - ZALAI NYOMDA ZALAEGERSZEG 84 3189 o I

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