Gecser Lujza Textil/Képek

Gecser has become one of the protagonists of the second generation of the textile revival that has followed. In addition to numerous large-scale national and international textile exhibitions, he was a regular exhibitor at the Szombathely textile biennial network and one of the most permanent participants in the Velem Textile Art Workshop (1975-1983): he was not involved in the work of the experimental textile workshop, which provided six weeks of creative work per year. For Gecser, the Velem workshop is of outstanding importance, since the cornerstones of his career are usually linked to the time he spent at the Vas County workshop and the results of the experiments made possible there. Gecser's work is also one of the most radical among the representatives of experimental textiles. Making a definitive break with the traditional textile forms linked to the plane of the wall, which also defined his beginnings, he created the classics of Hungarian space textiles in the mid-seventies.

All the while, he was constantly researching the nature of the fibre that makes up textiles, the structure of materials and the possibilities of using new materials as textiles. This persistent research was also in sync with the then dominant interest in textile art and the visual arts using textiles, which could be traced back to the historical avant-garde and led to the introduction of a new term, fibre art. Gecser - like her colleagues such as Anikó Bajkó, Gabriella Farkas, Judit Gink, Kati Gulyás, Ilona Lovas, Csilla Kelecsényi - had moved into the various modes of conceptual art by the turn of the seventies and eighties, a long path leading to different forms of conceptual art, to a complete break with the applied roots of textiles and to autonomous artistic thinking, in which new media, especially experimental film, environment and installation, played a major role.

At the beginning of his career, Gecser worked with traditional tapestry and knotted macramé techniques. His favourite material was sisal, and he was greatly influenced by folk art and pre-Columbian art, in parallel with the interest of his North American colleagues and contemporaries. In 1976 he won the 4th Szombathely Wall and Square Textile Biennale with his work Bridges, one of the first and most mature examples of Hungarian square textiles on a large scale, which he had made the previous year in the Velem workshop. Space textiles also appeared in innovative forms in his commissioned works, such as the textile installation for the restaurant of the former House of Soviet Culture, Bajkal (1973), or the textile installation for the Koktélbár (Cocktail Bar) in Petőfi Street (1976), and traces of them can be found in his set designs, including the backdrop created from rope constructions for the Bartók Children's Theatre (1973-74). The beginnings of this direction were marked in 1972 with Zigota, made with the macramé technique mentioned above, and in 1974 with Two Minutes. In 1976, his experiments with fibres stiffened with plaster (sisal ropes) and similar use of resin led to in-depth investigations with plastic.

This was aided by his time at the Tisza Chemical Combine, during which he made use of the plant's infrastructure in preparation for his solo exhibition at the Zwinger in Kőszeg in 1978. In the name of material experiments reminiscent of Bauhaus workshop practice, especially Anni Albers', work with various foils, cellophane, aluminium foil, transparent materials, cloture and silver spray paint remained fundamental to his work from then on. In 1979, the discovery of the visual impact of his earlier projected slides of plastic works led him to works using film projected onto spatial constructions made of opaque transparent materials, as shown in the exhibition Textil-textil ohne and in his solo exhibition at the Jókai Cultural Centre in Budaörs. Based on these directions and using mirrors, he built a large-scale environment in Velem, usually paralleled in the literature with his work Street by Erzsébet Schaár, which he repeated in 1984 in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle. Together with the film director András Szirtes, he made an experimental film about the environment in Velem (Mirror Reflections, 1981-82), which recalls the heyday of avant-garde film art and László Moholy-Nagy's Modulator of Light-Space. Film as a raw material for traditional textile techniques (weaving) was also a subject of his work at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Initially he made 'tapestries' by cutting and reweaving reproductions of his own prints.

In the next step, he used negative strips and exposed them together with the "weaving body", then experimented with various other possibilities of photo-weaving and further possibilities of photo and celluloid tape in weaving and woven material, using the formal language of "process art" more and more strongly. In 1983, he became preoccupied once again with the traditional textile substrate and its sculptural formulation through various filters and transverses of pop art and concept, drawing on the lessons of earlier stiffening processes. These drapery studies, inseparable from the influence of Gothic and Baroque art, are the shell forms of the human (mostly female) body.

Gecser was a frequent and widely active exhibitor in national and international exhibitions. In addition to these, he participated in other important exhibitions of the "thought-textile" such as Fotó-textil? (1982) and Textil a textil nach (1978/79). Alongside Margit Szilvitzky and Gábor Attalai, he had the opportunity to exhibit in separate rooms at the group exhibition of Hungarian textiles at the Amos Anderson Museum in Helsinki (1977). He has participated in the textile triennial in łódź on several occasions, in the major textile fairs in Leipzig (1976), Warsaw (1976), Aalborg (1977), Linz (1981), in the exhibition Material Change (1982), which accompanied the documenta in Kassel, and in the exhibition Eleven Textiles (1988), which was intended as a summary.

In recent years, acb Gallery has paid special attention to Hungarian experimental textiles, their achievements and their role in the context of the neo-avant-garde/post-avant-garde canon. Lujza Gecser's first exhibition in the acb space, which is a selection from the artist's legacy, is part of this series. The exhibition at the acb Attachment focuses on the beginnings of Gecser's career, the period from which the radical experimental artist's work emerged. Many of the works on display date from the very beginning of his career. The works on paper are collages of materials, which represent the meeting of drawing/graphics and textile design, which was the defining form for Gecser. The monotype collages, stylized and individualized folk art motifs and fabric patterns are at once autonomous works and applied works, but the experimental character is already evident in these works, which incorporate unique colour combinations and harmonies.

The exhibition also includes an early Gecser tapestry and other sisal works that still show signs of the traditional tapestry and its departure from it into space. The Red Prayer Rug echoes Gecser's interest in pre-Columbian art and Asian craftsmanship, while the smaller sisal works are both the first steps of a macramé technique extended into space and an imprint of the 'playfulness' inherent in textiles, an anthropologising conception of traditional 'craft'. Foreshadowing the mature experimental works of the seventies and the importance of the crossing of media boundaries and expansion - the steps towards film - that emerged in the artist's career at the turn of the seventies and eighties, the exhibition also includes the aforementioned film on the mirror maze.