Group exhibition: Pleats

As a result of the acb ResearchLab's research, the gallery has published two monographs and organised several solo exhibitions in recent years for members of the first generation of Hungarian experimental textile artists such as Margit Szilvitzky, Klára Kuchta, Aranka Hübner and Lujza Gecser. However, the exhibition at acb Plus is now not only intended to put the historical works of these artists back into context, but also to use its own means to highlight the fact that Hungarian textile art is now an integral part of Hungarian contemporary art history. Thus, the acb's exhibition includes experiments in the textile medium by contemporaries not involved in the textile movement, as well as textile-based works by younger artists, broadening the viewer's perspective. In this way, the exhibition does not present a coherent narrative from an art historical point of view, but seeks to highlight the experimental possibilities that have been and are still present in textiles as a medium.

The group exhibition has chosen the ladder as a central motif and key metaphor for its complex thematic propositions. Contemporary philosophical and aesthetic thinking, which (re)explored the art of the Baroque period, sees in the notions of fold, fold, crease, inflection the possibility of resolving opposites that seem irreconcilable. In this sense, folds and folds are not merely motifs or objects, but events, processes, intensities through which the material-form, out-and-inside pairs of opposites become transcendable. We hope that the selection presented in this exhibition will also be a testimony to the fact that textiles are still a privileged field for creative experimentation and a medium that inspires the renewal of artistic genres.

The exhibition includes works from several decades. The first section of the exhibition space features works reflecting organic and archaic forms and compositional techniques, which also exude a sense of timelessness. Klára Kuchta's monumental sisal fabric work of 1972, in addition to being an early example of the organic spatial extension of textiles, opens up feminist discourse, along with Kuchta's contemporary works, through its references to intimate female forms. The early work of Lujza Gecser (ca.1968-1970) also reveals the instinctive interest of her early career in folk art and pre-Columbian art, and many of her tapestries were inspired by this set of motifs. The surface of Sari Ember's monumental silk work of 2019 shows a stylized face on a surface painted with natural dyes. In its soft way, the work evokes the most archaic, monolithic portrait forms. Similar to her early sculptures, Zsófia Keresztes' textile works depict organic, organ-like forms that are in constant conflict with their rigid, systematic environment, in this case the cage. Judit Gink has been an active member of the Textile Art Workshop in Velem since the late 1970s. Her background as a print designer inspired her to create works on textiles from the 1980s onwards, mainly reflecting on photographic and painting evocations.

He will debut his first solo exhibition at acb Gallery in autumn 2024. Katalin Ladik's collages from the 1970s were inspired by printed patterns from women's magazines such as Burda. Ladik often reinterpreted the cut-out newspaper pages as scores in her concrete poetic, performative work. Aranka Hübner's plissezation of 1976 will be in dialogue with Ferenc Ficzek's moulded canvas triptych of 1983, as both artists were concerned with extending the plasticity of monochrome textiles. Károly Hopp-Halász's 1979 folded Magasles approaches the conceptual problem of geometric folding from the direction of the genre of painting. One of the most dominant works in the exhibition is Margit Szilvitzky's iconic textile installation entitled Square Square, also from 1979. This work by Szilvitzky is one of the major works of Hungarian textile art, as it is a large-scale synthesis of Szilvitzky's conceptual textile art of the 1970s and the efforts that were made from the late 1960s onwards to expand textile art in an increasingly experimental spatial way. Szilvitzky's extremely delicate, sensual paper folds of 1976 are also among the finest examples of geometric abstraction and conceptual, self-reflexive and medium-reflexive art that also appeared in textile art.

Exhibiting artists:

Sári Ember, Ferenc Ficzek, Lujza Gecser, Judit Gink, Károly Hopp-Halász, Aranka Hübner, Zsófia Keresztes, Klára Kuchta, Katalin Ladik, Margit Szilvitzky