Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)
NEW ACQUISITIONS - Mariann Imre: Saint Cecilia, 1997-2000 (György Szűcs)
MARIANN IMRE: SAINT CECILIA, 1997-2000 BY GYÖRGY SZŰCS Mariann Imre (1968), having completed her studies at the Budapest University of Fine Arts, became one of the defining members of the generation of young artists starting out in the 90s, who broke with the shrill means of expression of the 'New Painting' of the former decade, but would not be satisfied with the spectacular technicism of contemporary media art. Apparently, they relinquished the universal claims and 'world-saving' attitudes of Avant-gardism, and turned to more intimate, personal themes, 'minor savings'. Mariann Imre was one of the Hungarian artists participating at the exhibition entitled Tackling Techné at the Hungarian pavilion of the Venice Biennial in 1999, where visitors found their way into the exhibition space by pacing along on her 'embroidered' concrete slabs. A part of her work is characterised by a simultaneous use of heavy, block-like materials (wall, concrete) and translucent materials (cellophane, water), which, paradoxically, creates both an internal cohesion and a particular tension between the constitutive elements of her works. Her synthetic work, Saint Cecilia - the starting point of which is the reclining statue by Stefano Maderno in Santa Cecilia in Travestere in Rome - presents the dual, material and spiritual, character of human nature. Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music, and the fine fibres connecting the two spheres recall the strings of musical instruments. The installation, however, has no need of a thorough knowledge of Legenda aurea; it reveals an autonomous plastic formula irrespective of the title. By contrasting traditionally male (concreting) and female (embroidering) labour, the connotation of the work becomes complex, as, at the first level of interpretation, the Gnostic and Christian traditions mix, while the wondrous events of the life of the saint layer on top. With threads densely warped, the artist tied the two elements of the installation together - the human silhouette of concrete 'embroidered' with leaf patterns and the similarly anthropomorphic, translucent fibreglass sheet stretched out above. Tying here is to be understood literally as actual tying of knots, for Mariann Imre emphasizes that the person of the artist, her individual mark, should be felt in the making of her works, thus she herself assembles them in the framework of a several-day event in each place of exhibition. The final spectacle can thus be regarded Mariann Imre: Saint Cecilia, 1997-2000. Concrete, thread, fibreglass (installation) Fibreglass: 0.5x200.5x80 cm Concrete: 5.5x208.5x60 cm Inv.: MM 2000.15 Purchase from the artist in 2000 as an artistic example of post-conceptualism, also occasioning fashionable feminist approaches. After the work was displayed at the Milano Europa 2000. Fine secolo. I semi del futwo exhibition in 2001, it became a representative piece in the newly opened permanent 20th-century exhibition of the Hungarian National Gallery.
