Tibor Wehner: A World Fervently Sheltered- The Ceramic Art of Mária Geszler
Mária Geszler, ceramic artist, pupil of Árpád Csekovszky, who graduated in the first half of the 1960s from the College of Applied Arts in Budapest, won her first professional prize in 1969 – at the National Ceramic Competition in Szombathely – which was followed by recognition at both Hungarian and international ceramic forums – in Pécs, Vallauris and Koblenz – alongside such prestigious awards as the Munkácsy Prize and the Bavarian State Prize. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1966 at the Tornyai János Museum in Hódmezővásárhely, and this was followed by many further independent presentations: in Szombathely – the city where she has lived since 1966 – and in Budapest, in provincial Hungarian towns and abroad, including Graz, Vienna, Hamburg and in numerous locations around the world. From the 1970s onward, scarcely a small sculpture and ceramic biennale in Pécs took place without Geszler’s works; she was, of course, always represented at exhibitions of artists from Vas county, as well as in the presentations of the Terra group, and at international meeting points and forums of the ceramic world, including Japan, Italy and Germany. After the overview of the exhibitions, the next chapter of her professional biography would be the list of works preserved in public and private collections – in Geszler’s case, a rather extensive list – and then the enumeration of art historical studies: the long, hardly transparent sequence of articles and essays reviewing her exhibitions and analysing her art.
Such, then, is the fleeting, sketch-like inventory, the résumé and distillation of some forty to forty-five years of professional activity. And yet, not a single word has been said about the works themselves, the Geszler ceramics. As we approach the creations, we must not forget the era, the milieu, the circumstances – especially Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s, and the art of the area – in which the traditional branches of applied arts, particularly textiles and ceramics, with an unexpected and radical turn and a bold spirit of initiative, broke away from their earlier, exclusively functional and decorative determinants, and became autonomous, independent artistic media. The ceramic object took shape as sculpture – not as a decorative sculpture, but as a statue of intellectual expression, a condensation of emotion. Perhaps it is precisely this orientation, this striving, or rather this inner compulsion leading to a sovereign practice of art-making, that is the most important feature in the work of Mária Geszler and her contemporaries. And behind this characteristic, the not insignificant technical particularities are somewhat pushed into the background.
Mária Geszler developed her expressive style in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing on the traditions of Hungarian folk art and Asian pottery. She presented the works of her artisanal wheel-thrown ceramics period in a comprehensive exhibition at the Csók István Gallery in Budapest in 1980. Around that time, through her experiments at the International Ceramic Studio in Kecskemét, she began working with high-fired materials: fireclay and porcelain. Motivated by her interest in photography, from the early 1980s she explored the possibilities of combining ceramics with silkscreened photography, and soon turned her attention to the use of salt glaze, which she employed in the service of conveying substantive meaning. At the International Ceramics Exhibition in Vallauris in 1982 she was awarded a silver medal for her sculptures constructed from porcelain slabs. Her works employing photographic techniques – by their crumpled surfaces and blocks – evoked the deformation of the photographic paper, and by re-creating their composition, amateur snapshots transformed into expressions of symbolic force. By incorporating photography and computer graphics, and through the free associations of Surrealism, she shaped a world of forms and motifs filtered through emotion and dream. During the 1980s, her characteristic forms became the smooth, square ceramic panel with edges bent inward like sheets of paper, and the half-figure sculpture with turban-like head covering, that carried two-dimensional representations upon its surface. At the end of the 1990s, in a series created in memory of the Japanese woodblock artist Kitagawa Utamaro, she undertook to summerize the great questions of art and history, to reflect on freedom as articulated in the work of art, and to respond to the issues of everyday life. Her art radiates a delicate, intimate atmosphere; it is a mode of object-formation imbued with emotion, harmoniously uniting the expressive realms of plasticity and pictoriality.
It is curious to observe that apart from a few shop signs and small architectural decorations, Mária Geszler produced scarcely any monumental works for public spaces or buildings. At a time when her colleagues were realizing hundreds of fountains, reliefs, wall coverings, and public sculptures, Geszler remained committed to the small, at most medium-sized autonomous ceramic object: the artwork that creates and radiates an intimate atmosphere, meditative in character. Meditation, the projection of the inner world, and a rich, profound emotional intensity are characteristic both of her creative method and of the tone of her works, shaping the possibilities of how they may be approached and received. Yet this does not exclude playfulness or, at times, free-spirited roaming. For when we examine her planar works – her tablet- and relief-like creations – alongside those Geszler compositions that place idols, recurring again and again, fully into three-dimensional space, we must also highlight the role of the image evoked as a fragment of memory, a dreamlike recall of reality. Beyond the expressive ceramic body itself, the Geszler ceramic carries important iconic formulations and statements in harmony with form and matter. These often conjure strange, tragic associations, evoking dramatic content: as when, beside an industrial landscape, the airplane rose to become a central motif. On the bodies of idols – monuments raised to humanity – and across the crumpled, curling ceramic sheets swirling with motifs reminiscent of the East, the spread-winged airplane heightened the meanings of fear and threat.
The airplane is, of course, also linked to the artist’s personal destiny: to her unquenchable interest in the East, to the inspiration she drew from it, to the works she created in Eastern lands, and to her travels. She recalled it this way: “I am grateful to fate that I could fly around the Earth and see the world differently, from a greater distance and with pain – this world I fearfully cherish. What is in the last works is fear. Airplane-objects have been fluttering in my head for years, and last winter I tried to give them voice.” The idols bearing seemingly disordered surface motifs, the airplanes and the crumpled ceramic slabs convey and suggest brokenness, fragmentation, a sense of incompleteness. And yet: Mária Geszler’s art, out of these disparate elements, offers us an organic and complete, compact Whole.
[2012]