Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)
Ő P. SZABÓ was owing these works..." Krisztina Kókay familiarized herself with art by the bank of Kis -Duna, a smaller branch of the Danube in Esztergom, in the early fifties. For eight years, day after day on her way to school, she used to watch Ágost Bajor, "the painter of the town" paint different parts of the scenery, several of which no longer in existence. Later, still a young girl, she got her own easel and followed suit. In October 1956 when the shooting already started, she was painting the landscape from the Calvary Hill. She then lived through everything that happened in the town; and now, forty years later, she recalls the images of that time at a thematic exhibition. This show of a dozen pictures arranged around one theme encompasses the whole of her career. -1 did start out as a painter, as you can see from the childhood keepsakes, and I graduated from the High School of Fine Arts as a painter. Changing my course was partly due to the laws of that time that compelled us to work for one year before starting our studies at the Industrial Arts College. Financial situations made me and several of my friends choose a textile factory, although they did not have a real need for a designer. After the college I spent another year at a textile factory, again with no real use for my knowledge.- Did that realization launched you on the bumpy road of being a textile artist working in her own studio1- My two children were born and I spent some years with them. I only had energy left for drawing - and drawing became a lifelong necessity for me. It happened in the mid-seventies. I missed the greatest period of experimental textile almost completely. Later I met the intense artistic life of the workshops at Velem, where I worked twice. I was doing my own things there, I drew with very hard pencils, then I enlarged the dense texture of the drawing two or three meters big and added even more details. Fabric was only a base for me that I could work with the tools of graphics. Some of my works have been woven, but I don't weave. Drawing became a life essential for me. Sometimes the events of my soul and my life get into the pictures quite spontaneously, and I discover only in connection with a topic or an exhibition that I had been preoccupied with the things represented.- But you had to pick the texts written on the Mantle exhibited at the Városmajor Gallery deliberately, since these fragments together really represent the thousand years of Hungarian culture.-1 chose the texts deliberately but the motif of the mantle I did not. I only came to see it for what it was when I put the smaller scale version of this work on show at Fészek Gallery. 1 felt then that the little strokes might be letters. I remembered the Old Hungarian Lamentation of Mary, the archaic folk prayer by Zsuzsanna Erdélyi I was reading at the time. Having been born in Esztergom, Bálint Balassi was always very close to my heart. I heard Sándor Márai's poem Angel from heaven four or five times, performed by different artists, and I thought that it was a work of art everybody should know.
