Vida Judit: Postmodern design

In the seventies, she studied ceramics in the traditional sense at college, although even then she was not really interested in it, but rather was looking for its frontiers, its links with other artistic disciplines. Her work from the 1980s is made up of concrete utensil elements (the Motion coffee set and the hammer pot), but she puts the utility of the utensils in quotation marks. The ceramics from the nineties, now on show in acb Attachment, despite their trace of recognisable forms, take a rather ironic approach to the function of objects. They are luxury objects, not by chance made for everyday use. They are works of art. Or, as Péter Balassa called them, meta-objects, by which he means that the objects also carry their own self-reflections.

Vida started experimenting with the combination of ceramics and metal around the change of regime, and her Déjà Vu series was born. The first pieces of the series are reminiscent of traditional industrial tableware, but differ from it in that they are handmade, no two are alike. There is an exciting tension in the pieces as the fragile black or white ceramic clashes with the metal, which is a completely different material. The angular shapes and metal rods make the compositions dynamic. The works are based on a basic form, on which Vida has applied various elements. The decoration of the elements is not traditional either, much closer to post-modern architecture, as the decorative elements on the ceramics play on spatial effects. By the mid-nineties, she had abandoned the form she had consistently used until then, and the various irregular projections in her works at that time were moving further and further away from the original basis. In the last pieces of the Déjà Vu series and in W.A.M. K-626, the ceramics also become colourful. Vida's post-modern style comes to full fruition in his series Egogeotika, made in the second half of the decade. Ornamentation dominated by gold, black and red appears in these works, with metallic applications becoming more prominent. With this series, the objects completely lost their utilitarian function, becoming unique works of art. Floating in space, Egogeotika 11 is the epitome of deconstructed ceramics.