H. Bathó Edit – Horváth László – Kaposvári Gyöngyi – Tárnoki Judit – Vadász István szerk.: Tisicum - A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok Évkönyve 15. (2006)

MÁRIA EGRI: IDA LAKES ART

MÁRIA EGRI IDA LAKI'S ART The Ida Laki Gallery of Jászjákóhalma recently celebrated its 5

th anniversary. The permanent exhibition of half a hundred pictures granted to the artist's hometown opened on 25 August 2005. The artist has worked in a number of styles during her career, the collection of her oeuvre presents the distinct periods of her artistic activities. She graduated from the College of Fine Arts in 1953 and has regularly taken part in various exhibitions ever since. At the beginning of her career, she built up her pictures from impressionistic loose and light patches using the values of colours to represent the space around the motifs. The earliest piece of the Gallery is a stylistically significant Self-Portrait from 1961. From the second half of the 1960s onwards, the main characteristics of her tempera pictures increasingly became decorativeness, and top-view compositions, the emphasis of circumscriptions and local mono-colour patches (Lacika's Sick, Reading Girl etc.), in addition to this, she frequently used the surface of the plain wallboard as a colour leaving it unpainted and letting it validate itself as a contour and shaping force of space. Towards the late 70s, the artist gradually started loosing her interest in the realistic portrayal of man and his surroundings. The impressionistic or decoratively presented "beauty" did not satisfy her any more. She saw where the world was going, how the worst alternatives were gaining ground in every aspect everywhere, and how ordinary people were adrift defencelessly among them. (The World in Danger, Mars, the Red Planet) In addition, it became clear to her that she was no longer able to adapt her thoughts with her previously used pictorial devices. Finally, towards the late 70s she elaborated her visual system of semiology, which from then on, she used as the vocabulary of her art as meta-language. She stroke on the visual possibilities of the system of printed circuits: the associative power of the finely veined and serried meandrous lines and insulation stripes, platens, the microorganisms of tiny cubes of crystal. After this discovery, Ida Laki has used the forms of the printed circuit as background of her artistic communication. She uses this world of forms hinting at the technological development of our age to express what she wishes to communicate about our present. After a while any thinking person reaches the question of "Where do we come from? and Where are we going?" and starts analysing the good and bad days and years lived between the two endpoints, the reasons and consequences of our fate and actions. As a result of her two-decade search, Ida Laki believes that the misery, illness, bad decisions, miscarried good intentions of an individual, the bad moments of history, the losses, the reign and fall of great empires can all be calculated and exactly determined on the basis of the biorhythm that determines living creatures and therefore historical events. As a result of her collection and analysis, the series called Biorhythm — a perpetual calendar came to existence. In its pictures, she recorded the above-mentioned ascertainment with exact dates. To certify her data, among others she created Fatal Hungarian Back-downs in August, Fatal Years of Hungary and Europe in 1,100 years, Revolutions in Europe in March. However, Ida Laki'

s experiences and explorations wish to serve the well-being of the individual. After long years of investigation in the registry office, she created The good days of my village in the months of I

—XII (1963—1983). With the active days of months, and emphasised dates, she offers a solution to us: by getting to know the good moments of time articulated into phases, our steps can be directed in a positive direction. 276