Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)
ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - EDIT ANDRÁS: Metamorphoses: The Art of Woven Tapestry Past and Present
around is changing continuously, on all fields of politics, geopolitics, communication and culture. The announcement of the competition prescribed that only tapestry woven with traditional techniques could be submitted, thus it excluded the genre of experimental textile art, while it also required that —in accordance with the monumental character of tapestry art, the size of artworks could not be smaller than three square metres. Onehundred-and-six artists submitted one-hundred-and-thirty-eight artworks, representing twenty-five countries of four continents. The anonymous entries were evaluated by an international jury of five members (Edit András, Peter Horn, Elsje Janssen, Bernard Schotter, Rebecca T. Stevens), who selected forty works of thirty-six artists for the exhibition, coming from sixteen countries, from the United States to Korea. Fourteen artworks represented the frontline of Hungarian artists. Along with the tapestries selected by the jury, the award-winning artists of the Tapestry 1 exhibition were also invited to submit their works, free to choose their pieces related to the questions of the show: Jon Eric Riis, Susan Mouvat, Burn-Soo Song, Lívia Pápai, Eleonóra Paqualetti and Annika Ekdahl. Eight large-scale, seventeenth-century tapestries recalled the past of the tapestry genre, each with a theme suited to the concept of metamorphoses. Five of these tapestries were fabricated in one of the leading manufactures of renown: the Mobilier National et Manufactures des Gobelins, de Beauvais et de la Savonnerie, while the other three pieces were lent by the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. The old and the new tapestries were not hung separately, but presented together, in a kind of dialogue linked by their thematic unity (fig. 76). The traditional definition of tapestry art, formulated by nineteenth-century museology and genre theory, classified art branches on the basis of the material they used, thus grouping tapestry art within the applied arts. In light of contemporary critical theories, this classification has been challenged. These questions are all the more valid, since the genre of tapestry, just as the phoenix of myth, time and again, regenerates itself from its ashes, and after undergoing metamorphosis, has strengthened, returning anew to the scene by the new millennium. It was a leading art genre, subsequently relegated to the background for centuries, but succeeded in shaking both the forced categories of painting and textile art, the latter lurking especially in the 1970s, during the era of the experimental textile art movement. By the 1980s-90s, it returned to its own traditional techniques, and by exploiting its endless repertoire, it was able to renew its vocabulary and imagery within the framework of the genre.
