Mazányi Judit (szerk.): SeKKo IV. Szentendrei színes szobrok. 2012. június 23 - augusztus 26. - PMMI - Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai 35. (Szentendre, 2012)
COLOURED STATUES FROM SZENTENDRE Summary Judit Mazányi The SzeKKo (Szentendrei Képzőművész Kortársaink, Our Contemporary Artists in Szentendre) series, launched by the Pest County Museums Directorate in 2009, has aimed at giving an opportunity to see the works of artists living in or connected to Szentendre for the large public, as well as for the local people. The fourth exhibition of this series shows the coloured statues created by Szentendre artists, without any thematic or technical restriction. Sculptors in the town of painters Szentendre is known to be the town of painters, not of sculptors, but in the course of time it has offered a home or social connections to more and more artists who create spatial compositions, either as artists in general or expressly as sculptors. In 1926, when the Szentendre colony of painters was founded, only one sculptor lived in the town. Sculptors began to appear a few decades later, during the second half of the 1960s. There were local residents and newly settled individuals among them; others came in groups to live at the New Artists' Colony opened in 1969. Unlike painters, who drew on all kinds of inspiration, sculptors could not rely upon any existing local tradition, so they all had to find their own path to follow. The year 1 968 brought a remarkable change in the art life of Szentendre. Young artists appeared, who later founded the Lajos Vajda Studio in 1972, a formation representing Hungarian neo-avantgarde. The group's members, who were mainly self-taught artists, not only did cross the conventional boundaries with their themes but they had no respect towards the traditional branches and forms of art either. They paint, play music, make performances, and create sculptures and installations to this day. In the meantime, some painters surpassed the two-dimensional surface of the picture-plane. More and more Szentendre exhibitions presented sculptures. An outstanding example of them is the Sculpture Biennale, the national muster of Hungarian plastic art, which was organized for the second time, this year in the ArtMill of Szentendre. From figurativity to installation, through nonfigurativity and objects Considering the development and the output of sculpture in the town, we initiated the exhibition Coloured Statues from Szentendre. Not only did we invite sculptors from the elder and younger generation, we also included artists who transgress the canonized boundaries, thus creating spatial forms, from sculptures through objects to installations. The exhibition includes not only recent works but older ones as well, some of which were made more than ten to fifteen years ago. The overall picture gives a good cross-section of the stylistic tendencies of present-day Hungarian sculpture. Despite the fact that these works were made in different times, they equally reflect today's situation. This is due to the fact that the tendencies and approaches represented by our exhibition have permanently been present in Hungarian sculpture over the last two decades. This period has been characterized by the liberation from every restriction regarding material, elaboration, themes and sources of inspiration. It seems as if the whole set of the sculptural problems concerning mass and space, which emerged in the 20th century, had to be relived, reinterpreted, rethought or even denied, along with the new trends of our days, during the same time in Hungarian sculpture. 8
