If we were to examine Ilona Lovas’s oeuvre – who graduated from the textile department of the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest in 1974 – within the context of the history of Hungarian textile art, we would easily be led astray. As an emerging artist, she became involved in what art historian János Frank aptly called the “vibrant” era of Hungarian textile art – the 1970s – a period rich in bold and groundbreaking experimentation. Although her first public appearances can be traced through works exhibited at the Szombathely Textile Biennales and created at the Velem Studio, within only a few years she had wandered away from the traditional world and milieu of textile art. As early as 1984, art historian Péter Fitz wrote – on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Zwinger Gallery in Kőszeg – that Ilona Lovas was a rarely exhibiting, little-known artist whose works could not be fitted into conventional frameworks, nor into exhibitions organized around traditional genres. Her works were already at that time difficult to categorize, as they transcended genre boundaries and arose as expressions of questions addressing broad, universal human concerns. What made them significant was not their formal or expressive qualities, but rather their conceptual depth and the weight of their meaning.
Art historical analysis from the mid-1980s established that Lovas’s starting point in textile art could be located in the mid-1970s, when she worked at the Velem Textile Art Studio. There she created Ablak (Window), a work that explored the role of the textile thread itself. At the 1978 Textile Biennale, she presented pieces in which she wove transparent plexiglass surfaces with fine nylon thread. In the meantime, together with Anikó Bajkó and Zsuzsa Szenes, she investigated the relationship between landscape and textile, creating a land art composition on the hills of Velem by laying long textile ribbons along the folds of the terrain. By 1980, Lovas exhibited an independently conceived spatial installation in Pécs, combining natural elements with textiles. She covered the exhibition room with plastic sheeting and flooded it with water, constructing a jetty made of sod, on which lay canvas fragments imprinted with photographs of portraits and standing figures. At the end of the jetty, a sheet of transparent film bearing text sank into the water, accessible only by stepping along the jetty.
The works that followed this Pécs installation also demonstrated the integration of natural elements into the artwork itself. However, the grains of wheat that sprouted during the “lifetime” of the work were not mere evocations of nature: the artist transformed them into organic, living components of the artwork, embodying change and growth. “In her art, nature does not appear as representation, but nature itself becomes the artwork,” observed Péter Fitz. Through the 1980s, Lovas’s works – including installations presented at domestic and international exhibitions – employed combinations of materials such as papier-mâché, wheat, and water. During this period, culminating in her 1987–1989 creative stay in New York, she based her art on the natural phenomenon of wheat sprouting through paper pulp and lattice structures, creating works that resonated deeply with the intellectual and spiritual climate of the time.
A few years later, in 1991, Ilona Lovas appeared at the Lajos Street Exhibition Hall of the Budapest Gallery with a completely new body of work – one employing a surprising choice of materials, maintaining only the faintest conceptual link to textile art. This strange ensemble consisted of suspended and floor-laid, spindle-like forms bearing fragments of writing. Opening the exhibition, art historian Zsuzsanna Varga spoke about the unusual shapes and materials of the works: “The artist herself finds it difficult to describe her objects in words; she seems unwilling to confine them to any particular category, since every label would impoverish them, rendering one-sided the richness of their imaginative world. At first, she referred to the abdomen of insects as a model for the form, for its translucency, and for the material – ox intestine. The vein-like network covering the surfaces truly evokes that part of a body where metabolism takes place, where the mechanism of existence itself operates. … What material, then, does Ilona Lovas work with? She uses washed and laminated ox intestine – an inner organ of the animal. As a skin tissue, it envelops its content from the outside, yet the whole thing still belongs to the creature’s interior. So what we see here in the exhibition, the outer layer, is in fact something that properly belongs inside.” A similar use of material characterized Stáció No. 27, shown at the Fészek Club, where glass also played a significant role alongside ox intestine. Perhaps best described as an installation, this ensemble greeted visitors with a large, horizontally mounted wooden beam supporting a circular disk. This was accessible by walking between two rows of panels – ten on one side, eleven on the other – each composed of glass plates covered with ox intestine, like a sequence of “stations.” On closer inspection, inscriptions could be read on the surface of the shield-like disk: lines from the prayer and hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. Bathed in a golden glow by the stage lighting, the work radiated the mysterious luminosity of icons, and the entire space was imbued with sacrality, carrying the transcendent suggestion of the Holy Spirit’s outpouring. In 1995, with the creation of Stáció 28 – part of the Vízpróba (Water Trial) series at the Óbuda Society Gallery – new materials appeared in Lovas’s art. The ox intestine receded into the background, replaced by glass and steel, and joined by a new organic substance: pasta and wafer. Arranged as if on a table laid with glass and metal plates, these elements evoked the untouched table of the Last Supper. In his extensive monograph published in the Hungart book series, art historian János Sturcz observed of this work: “In her installations, Ilona Lovas, drawing on the rich associative potential of a few materials and basic symbols, seeks an ultimate, stripped-down form that, through its own intrinsic power, can evoke transcendence. In doing so, she creates a suspended visual–symbolic system that fuses sacred tradition with the minimalist creative principles of contemporary art, blending references to Christian iconography with eloquent objects, geometric forms, and materials.”
Art historian János Sturcz also pointed out that following the turn of the millennium, Ilona Lovas’s art became increasingly marked by an explicit tone of social criticism, which went hand in hand with a transformation of her artistic media. The materials and motifs she had previously favoured – and the compositions and installations they embodied – gradually gave way to photography, video, images, performance, and video installations.
In her video installations entitled S.O.S., presented at the Pintér Sonja Gallery in Budapest in 2006, she evoked floating hat blocks symbolising human beings, probing the themes of memory and forgetting. These strange wooden aids of the hatmaker’s craft – tompók – which carry a wide field of associations, reappeared in her later performances as well. “One might think that these small containers drifting on the waters of forgetting carry messages –” wrote art historian Edit András in her analysis of the installation “– bearing within themselves the message and memory of the past. It is up to each individual to decide whether they make their great journey along the path of forgetting or remembrance.”
We may agree with Sturcz János’s assessment that Ilona Lovas’s oeuvre – of which only a few characteristic groups of works could be highlighted in this overview – constitutes a distinct chapter in the recent history of Hungarian art and stands as a uniquely individual artistic achievement within the global art world before and after the millennium. While her work retains a hand-crafted quality rooted in the traditions of applied art, particularly textile art, her transcendent sensibility, her faith, and her conscious and committed embrace of female identity – expressed through unconventional materials and techniques, surprising and inventive formal systems, and the integration of new media – outline an autonomous creative universe far removed from its artistic antecedents.
In the introduction to the 2004 catalogue surveying her oeuvre, art historian László Százados observed that Lovas’s works exist within an atmosphere of silence and contemplation – the same realm conveyed by the art of Simone Weil, Paul Celan, János Pilinszky, Péter Nádas, and filmmakers Robert Bresson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and, in some respects, Ingmar Bergman and Arvo Pärt. In Hungarian art, similar sensibilities can be discerned in the work and thought of Zoltán Érmezei, Mária Fehér, Péter Gémes, Károly Schmal, and Péter Türk. These oeuvres guide their audiences toward the spiritual, meditative, transcendental, metaphysical, magical, religious, and sacred dimensions – to that place where the creation “…through the sensualisation of the ineffable, through the peculiar ambiguity and ultimate untranslatability of artistic symbolism, can point to the space left empty.” Ultimately, this was also the essence of the artist’s own confession: “I do my work and through it speak about the questions that matter most to me. My works look toward the sky – I want to align myself on the path that leads to the one truth. Everything is subordinated to this. I try to achieve it by spiritualising materials… My works, too, must become ever purer, ever freer of manipulation.”
[2016]