Márta Jakobovits is a defining figure of the fine arts of Transylvania – more precisely of Partium. Alongside her practice as a ceramic artist, her work as an arts educator and organiser is equally noteworthy.
As she put it in the introduction to her doctoral dissertation, she believes in the legitimacy of a meditative creative attitude attentive to materials. Over the years her interests have shifted towards autonomous expression, natural shapes, and an ancient ‘meta-language’. She is convinced that “within the expressive potential of materials there remain vast, still unexploited territories, and that, for our contemporary image‑making culture – ever more drawn towards virtuality – attentiveness to material sensations and tactile experiences can be a refreshing, renewing source” [1]. Accordingly, her ceramics are first and foremost works of art, and only secondarily functional objects – in their case, utility is subordinated to aesthetics.
In choosing her path, the proximity of the Nagybánya artists’ colony [an influential late‑19th/early‑20th‑century artists’ colony in Baia Mare (Nagybánya), now Romania] played an important part, and her visual language has been shaped by several movements. Pop art reached Romania in the 1970s; she, however, identified more readily with the Bauhaus movement’s more austere clarity of form and worldview. In her personal style, minimal art, arte povera and land art come through most strongly. In one interview she cites Paul Klee’s pen drawings and the singular world of Eugenia Pop’s ceramics from Cluj‑Napoca as examples of an originary instinctiveness to which both artists “returned through immense visual‑arts knowledge”. In her dissertation she also foregrounds the work of artists who sustain a dialogue with the natural environment – for instance Ulrich Rückriem’s rock samples and Andy Goldsworthy’s site‑specific works.
According to Mária Kozma, editor‑in‑chief of the Pallas‑Akadémia Könyvkiadó in Miercurea Ciuc (Csíkszereda), one can detect the influence of Joseph Beuys and – in a Hungarian context – the assemblage and environment traditions associated with sculptor Erzsébet Schaár. She also identifies, in ceramics she considers ‘organic’ in conception, “an artistic mode of appearance aligned with the landscape and grounded in natural materials developed in the wake of Frank Lloyd Wright and, more directly, elaborated by Imre Makovecz”. At the same time, by virtue of their colour and form, Jakobovits’s works can also be related to the atmosphere of Giorgio Morandi’s metaphysical still lifes.
For decades she was the wife and creative partner of painter Miklós Jakobovits (d. December 2012). Their choices of colour and subject reveal numerous parallels – their delicate pastels, lucid object depictions and sensitive surfaces speak of inner calm. Their humanism, amidst absurdity, turned their Oradea home into an island of visual art, even as “the dictatorship – an invisible web still threaded with humane ties and voices – swelled and hardened with slow obstinacy” [2].
In considering the formal universe of her ceramics, we should also note the lasting impressions of countryside and nature, and of the idealised years of her childhood in Santău (Tasnádszántó). These experiences gave rise to an art that radiates humanity and a balanced worldview.
Jakobovits’s ceramics do not speak of the present so much as of the constancy of matter: of primordial substance, and of the beauty and harmony latent in natural forms – the origins of her works reach back to pre‑antiquity… “My way of thinking, and my way of responding to materials are bound up with the archaic… with the enchantment of beginnings, and within that the equally magical attitude which produced a quite different creative lineage in art history: namely those features of archaic perception mediated to us by Cycladic – or likewise millennia‑old Anatolian – idol figurines, by Sumerian clay tablets, and by the world of Egyptian cult vessels, where form itself is the mystery. It does not depict, it does not create, it does not narrate; rather, it conveys to us special sensations, unexplainable sculptural experiences through the unity of form, colour and materiality. Realising this unity is the greatest challenge for me. Only through that do I feel I can reach, approach, what matters most to me in creation.” [3]
Her practice is built on the triad of material–colour–form: their careful proportioning intensifies the object’s impact. In her use of shapes, she has reached the form of pebbles rounded and worn smooth by natural forces. This inclination towards simplification, approaching pure geometric elements, and her capacity for precise execution also owe something to the years she spent at the Technical College of Architecture in Oradea.
The resemblance among her works suggests the core idea that defines her personal style as well as their universal message – in her own words: “I am increasingly interested in the relations between objects, in their mutual effects, a kind of mimicry, the way objects and materialities imitate one another. It is startling to me that, after a certain point, all kinds of material begin to resemble each other. This is a kind of merging into – or passing away within – a greater natural unity, but at the same time an identification with the universe.” [4]
Her approach to colour is, nonetheless, varied. She has particular favourites: in recent years she has repeatedly turned, for example, to turquoise (the chess‑piece‑like Türkiz király és királynő – Turquoise King and Queen; Kék dombok – Blue Hills; Időutazás – Time Travel; Türkiz zarándoklat – Turquoise Pilgrimage). Yet brownish reds (A Nagy kör – The Great Circle), whites (Enyhe szellő a fehér táj felett – A Gentle Breeze over the White Landscape; Kicsi fehér dombok – Small White Hills), and various shades of grey (Mimikri – Mimicry; Raku‑vázák – Raku Vases) also recur. The distinctive shimmer of compositions such as Ritmus (Rhythm), Fehér dombok (White Hills) and Zöld dombok (Green Hills) comes from the metal content of the glazes.
The surface treatments and facture of the materials she experimented with at the Kecskeméti Nemzetközi Kerámia Stúdió (Kecskemét International Ceramics Studio) are equally diverse – spanning a wide spectrum from rough, coarse‑surfaced raku pieces to smooth chamotte bodies. She often employs a method of material contrast, because these, she argues, “play an extraordinarily important role in visual arts, in shaping the visual quality of the work of art and its particular, subjective uniqueness. The special capacity of material sensations and material contrasts is that, when coupled with spirit, they can raise the human being into higher dimensions of life and existence, into the distinctive world of the arts.” [5]
Jakobovits works primarily with clay, which suits her archaic formal world and refined style better than porcelain, with which she began to experiment in the 1970s. “Alongside porcelain’s cool, elegant delicacy, the artist increasingly shows an interest in coarser, more chamotte‑rich clays, and in a distinctive, centuries‑old technique, raku [6], whose use results in a rough, primitive, restless surface.” [7] Her exhibition of raku works was held in 2000 at the Dorottya Galéria (Dorottya Gallery).
In the firing of ceramics, the four elements converge – matter taken from the earth is fired in flame, then achieves its final form through air and, at times, water. In practice the artist heats the clay to above 1,000°C and introduces various substances: for example oil, metal salts, bone, leather, vegetal elements, sand, and so forth. But she does not work only with porcelain or clay. From 1990 she also produced poured‑paper works, object‑collages (e.g. Koordináták – Coordinates), and characteristic works in glass.
Just as there are no regular geometric forms in nature, chance and irregularity are also crucial factors in Jakobovits’s art. In shaping her ceramics she aligns herself with a higher‑order system without limits. Their ideal habitat is therefore not a space bounded by walls, but rather the natural environment, into which they settle and with which they also enter into a kind of interaction.
The motif of message recurs throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Mária Kozma interprets, among other things, the particular sign‑system and aesthetic of works such as A mágikus jel (The Magical Sign), Üzenet (Message), Az üzenet kezdete (The Beginning of the Message), Egy bizonyos üzenet (A Certain Message), and the Üzenettáblák (Message Tablets) as a bridge between archaic finds carved into stone and the age of electronics. “She dissolves into peace and fixes in clay the antinomy of fleeting, passing existence and eternity – mutually exclusive, yet mutually presupposing. And as she concretises this symbiosis, casting it into form, it is as though she sought, with artistic sensitivity, to follow the metamorphosis itself: the unceasing change, the stations of matter’s transformation. Her shapes – sometimes seemingly finished even in their intended unfinishedness – truly yearn to return to nature. To where they were taken from,” writes Kozma. These objects therefore seem to come from a bygone age in which nature was still interwoven with the everyday lives of people.
At her exhibition held in the summer of 2015 at the Erlin Galéria (Erlin Gallery), she presented works made since 1978. Her large‑scale 1990 composition Koordináták (Coordinates) (51 × 51 cm) takes the form of a cross; A téli táj titka (The Secret of the Winter Landscape) evokes the Finnish countryside – as if we were glimpsing blue sky emerging between birch trunks… Her raku object Mimézis (Mimesis) likewise seems to imitate birch bark. (Her coloured‑paper collages were shown in a solo exhibition in 1991 in Siilinjärvi, Finland.)
A relatively newer group of ceramic works includes the reduced‑form pieces Ősanyákhoz (To the Primordial Mothers), Átvágott domb (Cut‑through Hill), Domb (Hill), Kapu (Gate), Téli táj (Winter Landscape), A téli táj titka (The Secret of the Winter Landscape), Csillanás (Glimmer), and Csillanás a vízen (Glimmer on the Water). These are gestures towards the laws of matter and the forms shaped by nature’s distinctive logic. “Art is energy,” says Jakobovits. Creation is a process in which, by transmitting the artist’s energy, dead material is breathed into life – and, as here, masterpieces of astonishing delicacy are produced, breathing with nature itself.
“The poetry of technique, the triumph of an exceptionally refined manual skill – all this is what comes from the artist’s hands. A singular, distinctive world. Past and present, deep past and what is to come, tradition and modernity, the local and the universal meet in her works; for, in her view, art is the domain of spiritual freedom, and it mediates in a quite particular way, in a highly oblique relation to space and time. It is at once bound to time and without time.” Thus does Kozma summarise the essential characteristics of Márta Jakobovits’s work.
[2015]
[1] Jakobovits, Márta: Metaterra - Anyagérzetek, anyagkísérletek a kerámiában. DLA értekezés. [lit. Metaterra – The feel of materials, experiments with materials in ceramics. DLA dissertation.]
Magyar Iparművészeti Egyetem. Doktori Iskola. Budapest, 2006. p. 4.
[2] Jakobovits, p. 4.
[3] Veres, Péter: Az agyag… időrétegeket összekötő varázslat. Jakobovits Márta hitvallása. [lit. Material… is magic connecting time layers. The credo of Márta Jakobovits.] Erdélyi Művészet, 2004. V. évf. 2. sz. 17.
[4] Nagy T., Katalin: Interjú. [lit. Interview.] Magyar Iparművészet, 1999/4.
[5] Jakobovits, p. 9.
[6] Raku ware is a ceramics process originating from Japan, allowing the creation of unique and unreproducible works.
[7] Kozma, Mária: Jakobovits Márta. Pallas-Akadémia Könyvkiadó, Csíkszereda, 2009.