Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)
TIBOR WEHNER Fabrics About Krisztina Kókay's exhibition in Esztergom One exhibition review published in 1970, that is 28 years ago, acknowledged that "Textile design artist Krisztina Kókay earned her degree in print fabric and hand-dye design at the Industrial Arts College in 1967. Since then she has been working for the Cotton Printing Company designing household textiles and dress materials. She designs useful and decorative textiles as a solution to the problems set up by modern, up-to-date interior design. Her handkerchiefs, decorated with Hungarian motifs and shown at the exhibition, won a prize in 1969. The attractively tasteful printed textiles, the textile picture of Mexican patterns applied on a brown background and the Sigillum logo of the Esztergom artists' group painted on silk, all original designs, show the versatility of her artistic skills. The frieze-like huge canvas and the pillow with the white scale-work on the blue linen cloth cover follow in the steps of the Esztergom traditions of the onetime blue dying trade." Art historian András Mucsi's lines, published after the exhibition of the Sigillum Group of Esztergom, introduce an artist at the start of her career with a wide range of interests and creativity. A comparison of the early works mentioned in the review and the works of the nineties, of the present, reveals a number of permanent and changing features. It is a sign of permanence and continuity, though seemingly just an external circumstance, that the artist who has been working in Budapest for the last decades still has a very strong connection with her native town, unbreakable ties that bound her to Esztergom. This is proven not only by the fact that after her two individual exhibitions of the nineties she presented her original collection of works again, in 1997, in the thousand years old town of the Danube bend - this time at the Christian Museum -, but also by the lurking presence of Esztergom in the deepest levels of specific Kókay compositions, through strange, often nearly impalpable but positively existing connections and transmissions, as an atmosphere or a mentality, an emotionally charged message, a motif that is both reminiscent of the past and somewhat abstract. (At other times, the town appears manifestly, though in a vigorously transcribed, conventionalized form, e. g. Lofty Castle.) Another sign of permanence is the artist's persisting in her versatility of the trade, her technical polyphony. Pi ■■ Vy.fes:;. 111 Viulw,
