Month: February 2016

DISMANTLED ACTS

The video works that are presented at American artist Madeline Stillwell’s first solo exhibition in Hungary chiefly concern themselves with the human body. These filmed documentations of the artist’s performances address the formal ways in which the body functions, the indirect rules of this functioning, and the processes of eliminating these rules.

In the performances, which are realized in urban or industrial surroundings, the environment and its characteristic materials are also emphasized. Waste material found in the street, in abandoned places, or in construction sites, can be seen to have the same significance here as the artist’s own body–therefore it is the living body itself that becomes the subject which initiates such processes.

These works balance on a line between control and chaos, order and disorder, and simultaneously encourage the viewer to reconsider everyday emotional dis/orientations.

Madeline Stillwell (USA, 1978) is a multimedia and performance artist, who has lived in Berlin since 2008. A professor of Performance at the Evangelische Hochschule Berlin für Soziale Arbeit, she received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2008), and her BA in Studio Art and Women’s Studies from St. Olaf College (2000), where she simultaneously trained in music, dance and theatre. Her live performances and videos combine material, body, and voice, often incorporating found or existing urban environments. Her work has been performed and exhibited internationally, including the Kassel Kultur project of Dokumenta 13, the Kunstverein Göttingen, and Bázis Gallery at the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca.

She has been a guest lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, at Bard College Berlin (ECLA), and at the Lüdwig Maximillians Universität. Her work can be found in such prestigious collections as the Deutsche Bank Collection and the Stoffel/Young Collection.

 

Video:

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CZÓBEL RECONSIDERED

A seminal figure of Hungarian art with an international prestige, Béla Czóbel (1883–1976) influenced the development of his native country’s art almost from the beginning of his career, in a manner already recognized by his own contemporaries. Along the way, he also left his impression in several of the centres of European modernism. At the age of 23 he already exhibited in Paris, at the Salon des Indépendants, was a founding member of The Eight, and later joined the Brücke group in Berlin. He had important solo exhibitions in Paris, Berlin and New York. In 1940 he settled in Szentendre. Czóbel was the first painter to have a museum dedicated to him in Hungary in his own lifetime. In addition to the largest Hungarian public collections, his works can be found in several of the world’s leading museums.

The exhibition entitled Czóbel Reconsidered presents the stages of the painter’s career in a chronological order, with sections dedicated to the different locales. We are introduced to his start in Nagybánya, his Fauvist period in Paris, his output at the time of joining The Eight, his time in the Netherlands, and the Berlin years, when he was associated with the German Expressionists. His subsequent move back to Paris was followed by a long period, the acme of his career, when he moved back and forth between the Frenchcapital and Szentendre. Several works have been retrieved from storage and are shown at a permanent exhibition for the first time, just as it is now also possible to take a look at the back of certain major exhibits, where images formerly hidden, covered or painted over have been revealed.

The exhibition is based on the Czóbel Collection of the Ferenczy Museum Center, which includes 160 paintings and over 1000 graphic pieces, while some of the works on view are on loan here, courtesy of the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, the József Katona Museum, Kecskemét, and the Académie Julian, Paris, as well as other institutions. Visitors can also watch interviews with, and documentaries on, Czóbel, and use an interactive information terminal to learn more about the oeuvre. One part of the permanent exhibition will be renewed periodically, giving more prominence than formerly to Czóbel’s graphic oeuvre.

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