Overview
Ilona Keserü turned 90 on 29 November 2023. To mark this occasion, the Hungarian National Gallery is paying tribute to the artist with an exhibition of her graphic oeuvre, comprising paper-based works, drawings, and prints.
The selection of paper works presents a career of more than seven decades, spanning from her early period as a student of Ferenc Martyn through the vibrant screen prints to the softly rendered Indian ink drawings. Visitors can see sixty-four works selected from the artist’s studio in Budapest, including works never displayed to the general public before.
In the face of political and cultural adversity, Keserü’s organic style of abstraction developed in defiance of Soviet rule following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The artist’s distinctive approach combines modern abstraction with references to Hungarian folk culture and historic European imagery. Her use of colour, materials and soft forms draw comparison with artists such as Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and Judy Chicago.
Anya Harrison, writer and curator, states: “For Keserü, the sensation of looking is always a haptic, bodily experience. Undulating lines – painted and appliquéd to surfaces or discernible in the shaped canvases themselves – are a reoccurring staple, redolent of the ebb and flow of waves or the wavelengths of light that determine and structure rules of perception. In fact, they’re a readymade form, taken from the idiosyncratic heart-shaped tombstones found in the cemetery of the small village of Balatonudvari which Keserü encountered in 1967; they have taken root in her practice ever since.” The erotic, corporeal associations connected with these forms are emphasised through her choice of colour, using fleshy pinks, lipstick reds and burnt oranges.
The show organised by the Hungarian National Gallery presents the artist’s graphic oeuvre, spanning seven decades but thus far less discussed, through iconic pieces – produced with printmaking and individual drawing techniques – such as the early studies, Indian ink drawings made abroad, works with tombstone motifs made in the late sixties in Balatonudvari, the after-images from the eighties and nineties and her latest prints 'Creature – Colour Leaps'.
Ilona Keserü turned 90 on 29 November 2023. To mark this occasion, the Hungarian National Gallery is paying tribute to the artist with an exhibition of her graphic oeuvre, comprising paper-based works, drawings, and prints.
