This morning I passed by the Art Nouveau gallery and I saw there was a new exhibition and could not resist going in. These places work like a magnet and as you can have a peep inside, there's no way you can just ignore it. So I entered this magical universe, again.
The exhibition was called Internal Stairs, by Gyöngyi Kerekes and me, the architecture fan thought I'm going to see some amazing stairs. Well, I couldn't be more wrong. The amazing part was ok, I was not wrong there, but stairs? Hell no!
This was the first artwork I saw and as I did not understand much of it, I thought let's look for the title, maybe it can help me understand what the artist meant, but there was no title. There was a note at the end of the row, with a title saying The Search For Balance. These artworks were made between 1992 and 1999, which means the oldest ones are 31 years old.
Having no title to guide me, I started looking at the details.
I'm not going to start with the difficulties I met as that is becoming usual now. Each time there's something, the light or reflections or both. However, what I observed here was, some of the paintings were framed not with glass, but with some kind of plastic (my observation, not a professional opinion), that cancelled reflection.
Not having to deal with reflections is a huge, huge advantage, I can't even begin to tell you.
These were those paintings and as you can see, there was no reflection. My shadow could still be seen, but that is something I can deal with.
On the other wall I saw the strangest artwork I've ever seen in my life. This is not camouflage canvas. This is made of real leaves.
First Page From The Book Of Changes
Not that I'm an expert, but it looked like these were ivy leaves. Standing in front of it, was trying to figure out how it was done. Leaves look good and are a lot of fun, but once they dry, become so fragile that can break very easily. These were glued to the canvas somehow and there were pins as well, but still. Imagine transporting such a fragile artwork. Worse than porcelain I'd say. Most likely it was done using big boxes.
First Page From The Book Of Changes could mean leaves turning brown and red during autumn. Not ivy though as ivy leaves remain green all the time.
Search Of Balance
Bed Of Procrustes I.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes (/proʊˈkrʌstiːz/; Greek: Προκρούστης Prokroustes, "the stretcher [who hammers out the metal]"), also known as Prokoptas, Damastes (Δαμαστής, "subduer") or Polypemon, was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed.
The word Procrustean is thus used to describe situations where an arbitrary standard is used to measure success, while completely disregarding obvious harm that results from the effort. source
Bed Of Procrustes II.
I think you can agree with me that this was the strangest exhibition you've seen so far, from me.
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