Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 16. (Budapest, 1997)
Új szerzemények
exhibition "Twentieth-century Hungarian Ceramic Artists - A Selection from the Stock of the Applied Arts Museum", which opened in October 1995. Funds made available by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Education enabled the Museum to purchase thirteen art works. Moreover, Li via Gorka, Győző Lőrincz, Ildikó Polgár, János Probstner and Katalin Szávoszt each presented one work to the Museum. Imre Schrammel presented three important creations to the Museum. Another outstanding new acquisition was: 13.Idol Ildikó Polgár, Budapest, 1987 Pyrogranite, porcelain Height: 217 cm; diameter: 30 cm The column-like figure, which is handshaped from pyrogranite, consists of eight broad rings and slightly flattened cylindrical elements which hint at a semi-nude female form and which end in a straight line at the top. During the course of reductive firing, the light, unglazed, chamotte turned a warm, brown ferric oxide colour. The rough surfaces are embellished with fine porcelain inlay of harmoniously matched blue, green and pink. The necklace hanging down from the shoulders - as if defying inescapable mortality - still shows intactness. On the tired body, which is divided into rings, the porcelain inlay appears only in irregular patches, in broken, curving lines, as if on a shabby gala dress; in places discoloured recesses emphasize - intentionally — the absence of this inlay. Ildikó Polgár 's column-like figures ("idols"), recalling Mediterranean goddesses from Antiquity, conceal her personal message on female existence and female emotions, in the decorative disguise of timelessness. In this work she created an appealing "monument" to beauty and joie de vivre from the basic motifs of being in a state of fragmentation, and being a fragment of a whole, building on the attributes of the genre and on the lessons of earlier thorough-going experimentation and observations. Bought from the artist, from a sum set aside by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Education for the purchase of contemporary works of art Inv. No. 95.88.1.1-9 (Csenkey Eva) 14. "Late Roman Bathroom Fountain" ceramic sculpture László Fekete, Budapest, 1993 and 1996 Porcelain, faiance, coloured clay, embellished with moulding and painting by hand in red and gold Height: 116 cm; width: 70 cm; depth: 50 cm This is a factory-made washbasin on a cone-shaped support becoming broader towards the top. Moulded onto the support and onto the outer surface of the washbasin there is rich flower (daisy, bluebell, rose and carnation) and leaf ornamentation. The hollow of the washbasin has a greenish, iridescent surface. The bottom of the foot is slit open and chipped; in the openings are female torsos. In the basin and towards the back of it are nude female figures, and dismembered female torsos, bleeding bodies and shattered, broken figures: masks, babies, a dog, geese, shells, the wreck of a small aeroplane and of a ship, Roman coins, broken amphoras; at the back of the basin, on both sides, there is a Coca-Cola sticker. On the chest and foreheads of some of the figures are targets, and some of the figures are embellished with (moulded) garlands of flowers. The water-spout on top of the fountain is made from clay which has been poured into a negative of the artist's face; the slashed, cut surface is covered with white glaze, with the initials FL (László Fekete) painted on. The object is one of the most important in the new series begun by László Fekete in 1990. By using rustic discontinuous coloured clay sculptures, he creates grotesque works of art which are rich in forms and which are of universal validity, with the help of "ceramic rubbish": kitsch, mass-produced smoothsurface ceramic items made by moulding, and designs which embellish commercial "orna-
