Kinga Azúr exhibition

An exhibition of the works of Kinga Azúr (Kinga Hajdú), a young artist from Miercurea Ciuc, currently living in Hungary, opened at the Kossuth Street Gallery of the Szekler Museum of Ciuc.

"I have always been attracted to paradoxes.

I was interested in how to express formally the contradictory, airy, yet austere dynamism within me.

I feel that if I can create a kind of harmony between two extremes in the same space, it can be close to the truth.

The material world almost forces spiritual entities to the ground, however strong the desire for the manifestation of spiritual 'space', it must be carried through the stubborn, extreme, individualistic criteria of material toughness, the often perceived corrosive identity of many social and artistic categories.

Nevertheless, the sculpture strives upwards, bursting skywards towards weightlessness, trying to shake off and overcome the very clinging shackles, to seep through, to be reflected into a sphere where ideas more easily take on a non-terrestrial form.

Ideas, and to some extent sculptures, survive us.

Something is changing.

The world opens up painfully", writes Kinga Azúr about her own art.

Written by art historian László Beke for Kinga Azúr's exhibition:

The art of Kinga Azur

After a few hundred (or more) catalogue prefaces, exhibition openings, reviews and essays, the writer of these lines can admit that each of these tasks is an increasing challenge. This is particularly true in the case of Kinga Azur, because she has asked me to write about her, which is as much a responsibility as an honour, and because Kinga Azur's art is completely different from the others. This last statement is an orphan cliché, since everyone is different, but nevertheless, at first sight here (and after hearing Kinga's first sentences) I sensed something very special - both in the way she looks and in the way she thinks - which I would like to describe below.

   Above all, Kinga Azure's name is peculiar, which could be the subject of a separate essay, but for now we'll have to content ourselves with the fact that it is a recorded stage name that she has dreamed up. Add to this the fact that one of his most important collections of artworks is called Fluidum, and we find ourselves in a kind of malleable state of mind, an inseparable mixture of conceptualism and materialism. According to an older edition of the Dictionary of Foreign Words, "fluidum lat 1. fluid 2. invisible spiritual current, as conceived by some idealist philosophical currents, emanating from the deity or the human body." For me: fluxus, the name of the famous art movement, from the Latin "flow", or "flow" as in "cashflow", which is again just flow, stream. Another association is the Whirlpool washing machine.) For the artist: transmutation, metamorphosis.

   In which this conceptual space of movement appears, there are at least two types of sculpture or installation. The first is a female figure that thins out into an almost curved or straightening line, while the other is a black metal (iron, steel?) stand or scaffolding system. Some twenty years ago, these works could have been included in the exhibition Metal Signs (Kunsthalle, 1999), where we explored the linear movement and drawing of sculptures made of various metals in space. Most of them turned out to be excellent for producing musical sounds.

   When I mention this, Kinga remarks: "That's exactly what it's like when Zsófi Tamara Vadas dances with my works." (!) And, indeed, the moving human body interacts with the "sculpture", with its own moving light and shadow. The chain of conceptual associations - at least for me - is somehow connected: the installation is nothing but scaffolding, the scaffolding is "the negative support of the construction", when we block the spaces that flow into each other with walls ("flow" and "barrier"!), and we don't even notice that we are back to traditional art.

   When we talk about sculpture as plastic, that is, three-dimensional plastic forms, we always think first of the positive forms of the human body. In sculpture, the negative is either a mould or a sculpture with holes, invented by Henry Moore, among others. Kinga Azur joins another line of thought: that of Alberto Giacometti, who thins the sculpture almost to a line. Kinga's female figures, her nudes, her splashing dancers, are more or less related to Alexander Calder's or József Benedek's mobile phones hanging on wires, Mamikon Yengibarian's "sujuks" made of beeswax, János Kalmár's "sword blades" or even the "Táj voices" of one of the teachers, Tamás Körösényi's Táj voices. Nor are there any artists from the "ancient" Slovak craft of "wirótostót", a tradition that is nowadays applied in sculpture.

   The dance and line sculpture are linked to the shadows on the wall and the black informal graphics. The background is sometimes blue, not only because it is the original 'natural' background/ground colour for the TV and video, but also because the artist is Azure.

   Azur & Noir, blue and black, is the title of a work that refers to fashion design, one of Kinga's professions, and probably explains why she moves so naturally between the museum space (in the past) and the outdoor space, the foreground of modern and contemporary architecture.

   Dancers, Xeropes, half-winged angels wandering out of intersecting lines, stork and other animals, music of spheres, shadows of scaffolding - genres, artistic disciplines, eras and present eras flow naturally into each other, figuratively, running, floating, fluttering, poetically.

   In this way, the 'critic' tries to summarise, through the artist's reflections, what it is all about, wonders which of their methods of 'controlled chance' might be more appropriate, and asks the unpoetic, if somewhat pathetic question: why shouldn't Kinga Azure be a 'PostContemporary' artist?

Budapest, February 2017