Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 27. (Budapest, 2009)
Márta KOVALOVSZKY: Unfinished Process
1. Gábor Attalai 20 szalag [20 bands], 1974 Felt, 360 x 158 cm becoming independent sculpture. (Fig. 1) In the same years, Irén Balázs was trying to take possession of space through the materials themselves. Alter her suspended textile Tulip (Tulipán , 1971), she produced the first contemporary Hungarian textile sculpture, Leány [Girl] (1972). While matching the hardness of the sculptural forms with the softness of textile materials and techniques, she almost imperceptibly crossed the borderline between the two art forms. She worked with an inward dismissive chuckle to old habits, but without heroic gestures or provocative self-assurance, and reached new territory while remaining in the world of stuffed cushions and tenderly embroidered canvases. Although Marianne Szabó's and Irén Balázs' textile sculptures were not taken up exactly as such by contemporaries and successors, their gentle daring certainly opened up the way for others. They certainly took the decisive step which took textiles - in the words of the poet László Nagy - "to the far shore", the land of "grand art", abolishing the independent, mutually sealed categories of craft and art. No less decisive were the moves made by textile artists in the direction of structure and seriality, adopting the new thinking in visual art. Their works came only a few years after those of their visual-art peers, and the lag is hardly perceptible in retrospect: what comes across much more strongly is their intellectual affinity to the works of painters, graphic artists and sculptors who showed the structure of things and followed the logic of visual phenomena - Zsuzsa Albert, Tibor Csiky, Tibor Gáyor, Gyula Gulyás, Károly Halász, Tamás Hencze, Dóra Maurer, András Mengyán and Péter Türk. In the first half of the seventies, quite a few textile artists were concerned with the issues of material and structure - enough to mention the activity of Aranka Hübner or the younger artists Kati Gulyás, Judit Droppa and Gabriella Farkas. The approach which was undoubtedly closest to the visual arts, however, shows up in Margit Szilvitzky's work from the mid-seventies onwards. This shed the casual and improvisatory character of Tértextil-vázlatok [Space textile sketches] (1975), exhibited in Kőszeg, with its undulating textile strips hung from a ladder, and became much stricter. (Fig. 2)The tightly-arranged movement of canvas strips and belts presented phases of a process starting in the infinite 156
