March 23–30, 2000

art

Sculpting an Industry

	László Fekete, "Head" (1999), colored clay 1240û C, gold, silver 750û C, 18 cm. high.

Despite decades of censorship, Hungarian ceramic traditions survive.

by Robin Rice

Terra: Eleven Ceramic Artists from Hungary

The Clay Studio, 139 N. Second St., through March 26, 215-925-3453

Perhaps the greatest designer of functional ceramics in the modern era, Eva Zeisel was the first woman to be admitted to the Hungarian guild that included potters. After learning to throw in the traditional manner, Zeisel left Hungary and designed china for industrial production in several countries — primarily the United States. In her late 70s, she was invited to return to work in Hungary for a few years.

Hungary has historically been a leader in the ceramic arts. As we see in the work of Terra, a group of 11 Hungarian sculptors now showing at The Clay Studio, the practice of the Hungarian clay sculptor and industrial designer are still linked in ways unfamiliar to American clay artists.

Following the collapse of nearly a half-century of the Soviet system, Hungarian state-run art schools were almost violently reorganized as young artists scrambled to process decades of taboo cosmopolitan styles and concepts. Art historian Jósef Sárkány’s catalog essay to Terra suggests that clay as a medium was not as rigorously restricted as other art forms during the period of cultural censorship. Certainly, training maintained the highest technical standards. The 11 sculptors in the exhibition represent two generations of Terra. Although about half of them also work as industrial designers, the aggregate impression is much like that of a contemporary ceramic sculpture show in the United States, though porcelain is much more in evidence.

László Fekete is currently completing a month-long residency at The Clay Studio. Certainly the most memorable artist in the show, he is also the one with the strongest reputation in the States. He shows regularly at the Garth Clark Gallery in New York City. Fekete makes the most of his proximity — both geographical and technical — to porcelain production factories. A series of Goddesses of Unidentifiable Origin combines flawed porcelain figurines discarded by a nearby factory with Fekete’s further interventions. One white goddess with a "bloody" (glazed) wounded head is decorated with fire-on decals of violets.

Fekete’s more recent sculpture incorporates myriad tiny cast parts in overwhelming accretions. Time Golem, for example, is a black clock. Twists of gold-lustered baroque trim fly away from its white face. Marked with Roman numerals and the motto "The Best," the porcelain circle fragments into spiraling slices. Three dog-like feet and almost every part of this flayed robotic timekeeper, are composed of springs and machine minutiae, an endless piling-on of details, which in our age of printed circuitry look both old-fashioned and futuristic.

Though his work is not as clearly related to factory production, György Kungl also relies on virtuoso casting. His porcelain car fragments are very realistic. Architectural works like Borromini Forever play off Baroque decoration, which seems to haunt several of the artists in the show (including Fekete). Piazza Farnese, with its gold touches and forced perspective is impressive, while On The Road places an automobile in a Fragonard-like setting with broccoli trees.

The technique of transferring surface designs to china informs Mária Geszler-Garzuly’s humanoid bottle shapes. Torsos printed with art historical images or photographs did not particularly engage me. Perhaps Geszler-Garzuly intends to suggest the broken-ness of history with cracked and mended surfaces and faded images or to critique hereditary rather than earned cultural power with crown-like structures on featureless heads. But these strategies are not as effective as a couple of small self-contained wall-mounted rectangles that ripple like fabric. In Hommage á Hiroshige and Electric Short Circuit, the ephemeral nature of art and time is suggested by undulating clay tea towels bearing faded icons of two-dimensional art.

Geszler-Garzuly’s former pupil Sándor Molnár makes tortured animal/human hybrids in snowy porcelain. They suggest the expressive surrealism of Picasso or even de Kooning with a freedom unusual in clay. They also reflect Molnár’s interest in folk art and ancient eastern cultures. Prostrated Figure 3 screams from a three-legged table while the alligator-like Dressed in Turquoise has a great glaze.

Imre Schrammel, the teacher of three other members of the group, has worked extensively in industrial production. The sugary surfaces on his rather traditional abstracted stoneware figures are appealing, but it would be nice to see his more monumental works. Smallness does not detract as profoundly from stacked porcelain and stoneware ziggurats by Schrammel’s former student, Márta Nagy. There is daring in Nagy’s joining of white porcelain, cracked and stained, and glazed gold on angled roof-like surfaces with the coarse black-glazed stoneware. Their hand-size chunkiness is effective and they do not read as miniature versions of something larger.

Last spring, Nagy completed a residency at The Clay Studio. Concurrently in residence, György Fusz, pinches and squeezes leggy calligraphic objects into the likeness of animated root vegetables. They are definitely in the postmodern idiom, but one tends to experience them as tabletop figures. On the other hand, their lurching expressiveness is unique.

Zsuzsanna Füzesi-Heierli’s refined and minimal but similarly leggy shapes have a curvy, linear modern look. Subtly textured, they perhaps seem more like tasteful and very attractive decoration rather than objects with the full ideational and emotional weight of sculpture. Perhaps this lack of scale has to do with the problems of shipping ceramics, but it does detract from the power of the show.

In a severe and geometric vein, László Szalai’s two narrow angled pyramids are identical in form but differently decorated. Gothic is an icy-looking irregular crag, something like Paula Winokur’s recent glacier-related sculptures, but much smaller. An almost Japanese simplicity in Szalai’s work is also felt in László Horváth’s minimally decorated, colored but unglazed disks suspended in freestanding frames of black wood. The white circles are displayed with the preciousness of ancient fossils or pieces of writing, an impression confirmed by the title Message from the 20th Century.

Although a connection to china manufacture is discernible in many of the works, only Károly Szekeres is showing vessels. Daringly cobbled together from lattice-like slabs impressed with intricate textures, the stoneware forms are colored with sprayed pigment: soft pinks, lavenders and blues — romantic, ruined fragments of some brilliant bygone fete.

One indication of the Terra artists’ commitment to craft is the frequency with which they include the firing temperature of a work as part of the labeling (not a common practice in the United States). It is quite possible to make interesting-looking clay sculpture with low-fire glazes and clays; however, schools in which ceramic artists learn the rudiments of traditional clay manufacture teach discipline. Those teacups and porcelain goddesses may seem (and are!) anti-inventive, but they connect the artists of Terra with the great history of the material for which the group is named. They have become not a limitation but a spur to individuality.