Ildikó Nagy
Changing Structures
Katalin Hetey: Steel Sculptures and Graphic Works.
Exhibition at the Mono Gallery, 7 May–6 June 2009.
Not long ago a new venue, the Mono Gallery, opened on Ostrom Road, which
runs steeply up the north side of Castle Hill in Buda. Its declared intention
is to show the work of contemporary artists, including most emphatically
sculptors. In May 2009 the work of Katalin Hetey was on view, of a double
pleasure for art lovers. Hetey's sculptures are rarely shown in Hungary, and yet
she is one of the most important of contemporary Hungarian sculptors of our
time. This was a chance to honour one of the country's least known creative
artists. Hetey left Hungary in the wake of the 1956 revolution, and for 25 years
even fellow-artists heard little about her, though by the eighties she was
already being allowed to show her work and, indeed, she even moved back to
Hungary. That, though, was only to remain modestly in the background:
retrospectives of her work were arranged in provincial cities (Miskolc, Gyôr),
in Budapest, however, she featured mainly in group shows and small solo
exhibitions. Those, along with a high-quality album and a catalogue of her
work, both published in 2005, were enough to make her name, and even win
her a degree of recognition (she was awarded a Kossuth Prize in 2009), but a
real breakthrough to a wider public, which she deserved, would have needed a
big one-man exhibition in Budapest. The Mono Gallery, restricted to the
limitations of what was possible for them, showed only a small and focused
segment of the whole oeuvre, with the goal primarily of arousing attention and
paying respect to an artist, who will turn 85 this year.
The two decades of this period were years of major expansion in sculpture, a
process reflected in writings on the history of sculpture as something quite
independent of that of painting, with more books being published about
sculpture than had appeared in the half century before. Quite apart from
strictly art-historical surveys, there were also surveys that took a particular line
in grouping and analysing works in relation to the inherent laws of form, such
as mass and sculptural volume. This was when critical writings began to record
the process through which the art of modern sculpture was born, with the art
of forming mass turning into the art of forming space. The change in approach
was no doubt assisted by the fact that the big metropolises of Western Europe,
in seeking to rebuild after the Second World War, had ever greater aspirations
to integrate modern sculpture and offered to artists large-scale commissions
like never before. All the arts strove to think in terms of spatiality. With even
painters stepping out of planarity to concern themselves with the possibilities
of three-dimensional modelling, the moulding of the immediate environment,
the aesthetically organised relationship of abstract form and space, of colour
and space, became central issues.
The sixties were a time of interaction between art and industry and the
growth of industrial production gave design a huge boost. The call for a
modern, artistic moulding of functional objects came to be taken for granted,
and artists were thrilled to discover industrial rationality, the beauty of
mechanical structures. Sculptures emulated the aesthetic of machines, with
public arenas sprouting sculptures of highly polished metal, mechanically
operated mobiles, and enormous, cheerful works of plastic art composed of
brightly coloured tubes.
In complete contrast, the other major movement of the time, Art Brut used
ordinary materials without regard for traditional ideas of what was aesthetic,
showing the other side of modern industrial society in all its brutal rawness,
the singular "aesthetic" of rubbish and scraps of waste. So art, even as it strove
to create a clear-cut, lucidly arranged, logical order of structured spaces
through a new interpretation of the relationship between space and mass, was
turning with avid interest to everything that was its opposite: of the moment,
unpredictable and chaotic. The material of such works seems to live a life of its
own, with lacerated, crumpled surfaces and compressed masses collecting
within themselves and re-radiating the external forces which formed them.
There is no regular form or reassuring plane to be seen. Artists discovered the
beauty of the world of the objet trouvé, scrap metal and rusting engine parts.
The fringe of life encountered the peak of art. Katalin Hetey grasped both,
resolving the contradiction between them by organising chaos into structures.
[...]
Ildikó Nagy
is an art critic specialising in twentieth-century Hungarian art.
