Formal Training and the Beginnings of Her Career
During her studies at the College of Applied Arts (now: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) between 1971 and 1975, under the guidance of the goldsmiths József Engelsz and József Pöpöskei, she became acquainted with those professional principles whose practical application would have enabled her to embark upon an independent practice in object-making.
Immediately after completing her studies, in 1976, she participated in an international group exhibition in Jablonec, Czechoslovakia; however, thereafter, until 1982, there is no record of any further artistic activity. This circumstance suggests that, in light of the expectations associated with her formal training, she had not yet found a clear articulation of her personal artistic vocation.
It should be noted that the former function of the art form’s historical categories as instruments of state representation had by then become obsolete: instead of expressing the identity of the community, in the second half of the 1970s, these categories were called upon to articulate individual identity. However, the transformations of the forms of these communal categories had not yet been shaped by contents legitimised by this new function.
As a consequence, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside possible alternatives to formal adherence to the historical categories of goldsmithing, an applied artist at the outset of their career had to contend with inauthentic articulations of content, uncertainties of function, and the uncritical perpetuation of formalised stylistic conventions.
Within this social and intellectual milieu, Katalin Katona sought authentic possibilities for her personal identity in a manner that would enable her to assume a genuine role within the community.
Communal and Individual Forms of Artistic Expression in the 1980s
From the early 1980s onwards, she consistently took part in group professional presentations by goldsmiths, and in national exhibitions of applied and fine arts. Each of these appearances reflects a conscious search for an artistic path and a clear commitment to a distinctive artistic direction that was fundamentally at odds with the conventions of institutional goldsmith training, and was more closely aligned with the sculptural approach associated with the training led by Gyula Illés. This phase of her career culminated in three solo exhibitions, held in 1988, 1989, and 1991.
Each group of works produced during this decade offers a clear demonstration of the extent to which she integrally linked object-making with the possibilities of sculptural expression, while her artistic statements were more strongly driven by an interpretative engagement with reality than by the development of practical function.
In her practice of object-making, she followed the laws inherent in the material itself rather than the rules of design. By working with the material’s inherent properties, she broke the rigidity and hardness of the metal imposed by deliberate design.
Rather than immobilising a moment in a utilitarian object, her work evokes physical movement alongside a parallel movement of thought.
The works of her relief series constructed around a tree motif constitute the first manifestations of her artistic identity.
In the vegetal forms shaped from melted and thermally deformed copper on black iron plates, a distinctive unity of visual fidelity and abstraction, pictorial quality and plasticity is realised. These works are connected to goldsmithing solely through their metallic materials, but they powerfully signal the artist’s intention to reinterpret the historical forms of a classical category and to realign them with the spirit of the present, thereby authenticating them through contemporary concerns. The dynamically curving branches and the foliage, appearing only at the ends of the branches, extend beyond the boundaries of the pictorial field, straining against the formal limits of every category invoked within the composition.
At the same time, the artist’s profound respect for materials and for their intrinsic capacity to be shaped is clearly evident.
The small decorative boxes and other boxes produced during this period, while remaining connected to the traditional object-making of goldsmithing, convey the artistic concerns already evident in the reliefs. On the surfaces of these storage objects, defined by regular geometric forms, the vegetal motifs fashioned from metal mesh serve not merely a decorative function but also raise philosophical questions.
The contrast between the two materially distinct types, the elegance of polished luminosity (who knows what it conceals?) and the melted, degraded substance that settles upon the realm of secrecy, invites a rethinking of the entire worldview, value system, and set of practices bound up with the use of objects.
This line of inquiry is pursued further in the group of brass chalices and goblets. Organic, sculptural motifs of thermally deformed, crumpled copper or applied metal mesh are fused onto the surfaces of their regular, cylindrical forms, thereby questioning the inner truths and contemporary legitimacy of the representational practices to which such objects are historically bound.
The beauty of these works does not derive from manual craftsmanship, although they are also impeccable in this respect, though differently from their historical predecessors.
Instead of the usual elaborate refinement, the chalices and goblets are characterised by the simplest forms and an austere luminosity. Their refined workmanship is manifested in a new and unconventional decorative potential that emerges through the pairing of dissimilar materials.
In their beauty, a cathartic determination is accorded equal weight with manual craftsmanship.
In the 1980s phase of her career, Katalin Katona also engaged in reinterpreting the possibilities of jewellery-making, another traditional category of goldsmithing.
The works she produced in this category are characterised by a combination of leather and copper tubing, whose juxtaposition and treatment depart from tradition in the same way as in her other object groups, while likewise raising philosophical questions.
In contrast to the customary use of precious metals and the refined modes of workmanship in jewellery, these works deliberately embrace rawness and roughly finished forms. In place of the traditional rigidity of meticulous ornamentation, softness and pliancy are introduced. Traditionally removed from the copper surface by pickling, the borax used as an auxiliary material in the melting process was intentionally left in place by the artist, resulting in a painterly softness of surface.
This softness was further intensified through the suppleness and malleability of leather, such that crumpling, as a mode of working, carries a dual meaning here, as it does in the case of the chalices.
The Figurative Sculptures of the 1990s as Autonomous Forms of Meditation
During the phase of her artistic career in the 1990s, commissioned works become prominent, works that, in accordance with the client’s requirements and their practical function, are not the products of a purely artistic interpretation of reality.
Defined by their category, the chandeliers installed in 1987 in the chapel of the Farkasrét Cemetery, the metalworks created in 1990 for the Thermal Hotel Aquincum, the coat of arms with angels created for the Hungarian Embassy in Vienna, and the sign of the King Saint Stephen Pharmacy from 1993, all seek renewed possibilities of communal representation through their connection to historical traditions. However, with the exception of the chandeliers, these works demonstrate how classical categories are reinterpreted and rendered contemporary through an explicit engagement with figurative sculptural expression.
The 70-centimetre-high figure of Bacchus, made of bronze and copper, is suspended within the hotel interior, seated on a beam with its legs dangling into the space. The visual presence of the figure’s body, shaped through deliberate distortions of proportion, produces a grotesque effect. This grotesqueness, intensified by a palpable sense of vulnerability, renders the figure gentle and endearing.
In 1994, Katalin Katona continued along this path with a relief and a small sculpture commissioned by the Architectural Department of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Hungarian Embassies in Ottawa and Bratislava (Pozsony), as well as with a balustrade adorned with putti, realised in 1997 as part of an architectural commission for the antiques shop in Úri Street, Budapest. In the mythologically inspired sculptural context, the 12-centimetre-high bronze figure appears detached from society’s established codes of behaviour, and its charm lies precisely in its ability to rise above the constraints of convention.
The sculptural statements produced in connection with architectural commissions, conceived in the spirit of reinterpreting the traditional objects of goldsmithing, mark an intriguing turn in Katalin Katona’s career.
Whereas behind each reinterpreted object one could still discern a personality shaped by a specific social reality, together with that individual’s relationship to the object, the figures presented through their corporeal appearance are explicitly identifiable as mythological beings and thus have no direct connection, grounded in lived practice, either to historical periods or to the social realities of the present.
It might be asked what role do they play within the compositions and within the artist’s message?
An answer to this question may be found in the three-part bronze relief series A kék madár (The Blue Bird), created at roughly the same time as the balustrade adorned with putti. These reliefs also draw on mythological sources: within the bronze frame, the putti represent three successive stages of an event through changes in their positioning.
Rather than referring to social reality or to a specific mythological setting, the frames may be seen as the deliberately assumed milieu of the artist’s own world. By virtue of their objecthood, this act of artistic emphasis no longer offers the outward-looking function of a window, nor does it fully provide the reality of the artwork itself: it only supplies the delimiting element, not the supporting surface.
The relationships between the figures rendered vulnerable through their grotesque character, together with the changes in their spatial positions, model the path of the search for happiness, a path that invariably leads into dimensions beyond the human scale. The structural organisation of the composition and the semantic qualities of the motifs jointly convey that, while the pursuit of the soaring bird may keep the seeker within a human-scale reality, the soaring of our own desires and our search for happiness carries us beyond the confines of physical reality.
Similarly, although inspired by historical sources, the relief series Bibliotheca Hungarica, created in 2000, does not depict material beings, but angels.
This ensemble exemplifies the possibility of treating a traditional sculptural category within the medium of goldsmithing. The fundamental element of each of the five reliefs is a bronze brick block. The brick-like quality of the geometric form, understood not only formally but also in terms of content, is further emphasised by the artist’s decision to present it not suspended on a wall, but laid horizontally on a pedestal.
In this state, the fundamental element of the compositions appears as a building block, as a unit capable of extension, simultaneously evoking both the notion of concrete physical constructability and intuitions being built into a spiritual reality.
This latter aspect is underscored by the figurative, ornamental, and textual motifs articulated on the brick block in finely calibrated proportions. Historical symbols, ideas, and phrases are for the most part structured onto the brick with geometric order and regularity, yet certain elements slip off its surface, or conversely, creep onto it.
In terms of their content, the motifs of the composition almost exchange roles: the brick block does not function as a building element, but rather serves as a surface upon which various phenomena are constructed, which slip off or creep onto the surface, but are still able to support the part that is originally intended to provide physical support.
Despite their historical determination and architectural engagement, the brick blocks recall the space-generating reality of those reliefs by the creation of which Katalin Katona discovered meditation as an autonomous mode of existence in the late 1980s. It is therefore no coincidence that subsequently her first figurative works emerged within architectural space as commissioned projects, since a figure placed in such a context was simultaneously required to function as a constructive element of the given space; that is, the practical dimension of its relationship to the environment had to assert itself far more strongly than in a purely abstract realisation, such as within an exhibition.
By contrast, the progressively attenuated and ultimately vanishing frames of the Kék madár (Blue Bird) compositions indicate the articulated human and artistic aim lies in the perception and lived experience of horizons beyond the frame, that is, of the supernatural. In other words, mythology retreats from the natural and architectural milieu and resumes its original role as a mediator between dimensions.
Column Motifs of the 2000s
In the spirit of striving towards the perception and lived experience of the supernatural, various versions of the compositions Időoszlop (Column of Time) and Dicsőség (Glory) were created in 2003 and 2004.
By this point, the relief bricks that had previously stood upright and later lay horizontally had evolved into columns; that is, following the inhabitation of natural space first with human-scale architectural forms and then with mythological figures, she took an initial step by associating her putti, angel wings, and ornamental motifs with columns and obelisks on a small sculptural scale.
The mythological figures are positioned in places recessed into and cut into the body of the column; the wings are fitted to its surface, and vegetal formations appear incised into it.
Although these sculptures are small in scale, through their structure and the relationships between their elements, they nevertheless appear as living entities organically embedded at specific moments in time within the infinity of time that stretches between heaven and earth.
These expansive sculptural ideas called for monumental expression. For this reason, the artist created cast-iron pedestals for her small bronze sculptures. Whereas the core of the small-scale sculptures is a regular geometric form, pierced and cut through by the accompanying motifs, the pedestal assumes the appearance of a consolidated unity of bundles and clusters, of amorphous formations. In these compositions, cast iron and bronze form a distinctive, cohesive relationship. The two major cultural and historical periods signalled by these materials are joined within the sculptures in the manner of a supporting foundation and the expansion built upon it. The relationship between the two different materials recalls the wood-motif reliefs created in the early 1980s, in which the artist had already articulated this idea in terms of planar relations: organic forms in copper appeared against an iron background, upon its supporting surface.
At this stage of Katalin Katona’s human and artistic meditation, the obelisks are complemented by wing motifs. This solution signals a clear recognition that, following the initial tentative attempts at flight made by human longing originating in material reality through the mythological transfiguration of material beings, she was able to articulate praise, ‘Glory’, addressed to the Creator in the language of sculpture as well. In the spirit of this same conviction, the compositional role of the happiness-seeking putti changes: first, the figure (perhaps no longer a putto) appears at the base of the obelisk, beneath the wing motif, with arms raised in an attitude of praise; later it disappears entirely, giving way to the wing motif, repeated in relief form on the side wall of the obelisk.
Her works praising the Creator were produced almost simultaneously with Időoszlopok (Columns of Time), and, in a manner analogous to the inner experiences articulated in those works, the Dicsőség (Glory) obelisks also received pedestals constructed from bundles and clusters of cast iron.
This correspondence between the two groups of works is significant, since around 2010, she continued to explore the sculptural and compositional possibilities of the column motif, and, alongside the supporting function of the column, she examined other potential roles of the column through a sculptural interpretation.
She created a pair of columns called Fény-oszlop (Light Column), which serve as models of her relationship to transcendent reality and of the certainties she had gained from it.
What is distinctive about these columns is that, within their solid bodies, the artist created internal fissures running along the vertical axis, and it is within these fissures that the process unfolds which had previously been located on the surface of the supporting element or in its surrounding space.
It constitutes a distinctive visual experience that the column defines space not only outwardly but also towards its interior, opens up space, and renders perceptible the spatial dimension of a meditative mode of being.
In the first piece of both the smaller and the larger column, the fissure is filled with wing movements, whereas in the fissure of the second piece a cross motif appears.
The movement of the wing motifs inevitably evokes the story of Jacob, with the image of the ladder linking heaven and earth and the angels ascending and descending upon it:
“And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven” (Genesis 28:12)
The certainty attainable in different historical periods that took shape in this experience for Jacob and for Katalin Katona alike is fused into a single unity in the fissure of the second column, where one side of the cross appears as a corpus and the other as a luminous surface, two distinct modalities of God’s presence:
“For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” (Genesis 32:30)
Within the fissure of the second piece of the monumental pair of columns, the double cross articulates the idea of ‘God is One’ amidst horizontally arranged wing motifs.
Within the firmness and hardness of the iron columns, bronze wings that imitate airy movement, together with the varying degrees of their luminosity, convey a sculpturally playful interpretation of reality that nonetheless exerts a profound, cathartic force.
The Light Columns recall Katalin Katona’s early works, the small decorative boxes and other boxes, in which the polished elegance of the surfaces preserved a sense of secrecy, while the sculptural motifs applied from metal mesh offered a tentative, suggestive means of access to the secret.
The traditional demand for luminosity in goldsmithing is invested with new meaning in the column compositions, where luminosity is not intended to enhance the prestige of social representation, but rather finds a new role in articulating the personal character of transcendent reality.
The Gate Motif and the Building Itself
This approach appears in an almost paradigmatic form in her work in her work Tér-idő kapu (Space-Time Gate), created in 2007. The composition is an opening in space constructed from simple structural elements, which, through its numerical and formal symbolism, presents one of the traditional categories of goldsmithing, the gate, in a renewed conceptual interpretation and, correspondingly, in a new mode of technical realisation.
The superimposition of the cast-iron column elements may be interpreted as a condensation of the gate’s wings, while nothing impedes passage through the opening.
Monumental in scale yet perceptible in its finest sculptural details, this experience of the freedom of soul and spirit may be regarded as one of the most urgent concerns of the present age.
The gate, understood as an opening defined by columns and enabling horizontal passage, simultaneously invites the realisation of forms of passageability within the same dimension of reality (whether from soul to soul or as bonds sustained within a social community) and the conscious pursuit of connections between different dimensions of reality that can be experienced in communal terms.
The recognition of the gate’s potential to articulate space and community is clearly evident in Katalin Katona’s later works as well.
The Relationship Between Temporal and Timeless Reality
Katalin Katona no longer requires the mediating co-operation of the column in order to proceed further. She has a firm assurance in the sustaining power of the wings, that is, of the Creator, that allows her to move securely within this realm even without physical points of support. Her suspended sculptural series A teljesség felé (Towards Wholeness), created in 2011, invokes lines from a poem by Sándor Weöres and, through wing motifs without supports, bears witness to the path she traverses within the spaces of earthly reality.
The first pieces of the series evoke the sensation of physical flight through diagonal movement rising at an acute angle from the horizontal. On the surface of an organic form, a square rendered as a negative imprint in the surface models the soaring nature of bodiless movement as it interrupts the flow of the lines of the poem. The second pair of wings in the series, although not aligned with any horizontal supporting surface, through its vertical orientation, raises the possibility of being interpreted as a column.
Through their organic dynamism, the feather-like terminations of the bronze blocks intensify the sense of upward movement and ascent that is already perceptible within the architectural element regardless of its static nature. In the closing composition of the series, the column becomes a human torso, slightly inclined, with wings aligned to this inclination. The figure’s head and face lend personal credibility to the ontological condition of human existence, its capacity to connect heaven and earth.
A further, more fully matured sculptural articulation of this mode of existence is embodied in the pair of sculptures entitled Időtlen (Timeless), created in 2013, whose subtitle once again alludes to the poetry of Sándor Weöres: “…the timeless shimmers through into the temporal world.”
The fragmentary nature of the bronze male and female torsos that appear on the iron columns is brought into balance and completed by wing motifs. At this stage of existence, their personal identity is defined less by facial features or the movements of the limbs than by the motifs of flight unfolding from within them, pointing, through materials that have defined the earthly epochs of human civilisation, towards the era of timelessness.
The next stage of this existential experience is represented by the composition created in 2015, entitled „…ahol nincs több »én« és »nem-én«" (“…Where ‘I’ and ‘Non-I’ No Longer Exists”), once again drawing on the words of Sándor Weöres. Here, the vertical iron elements no longer serve as supports but instead hold the female torso laterally, sustaining it in a state of unsupported suspension. Her existence between heaven and earth is so evident that it no longer calls for visible bodily signs or wings. In their movement towards the supernatural, the flesh and blood of natural reality are borne by metal of cosmic origin.
Following this experience of the unity of existence between creator and created beings, it is natural for the soul to seek passage through the gate that opens into the realm of light. The monumental structure of the Fény-lélek kapu (Light-Soul Gate), conceived as a counterpart to the Space-Time Gate created ten years earlier, brings together the artist’s continuously deepening insights into the interpretation of reality.
[2017]