Erzsébet Katona Szabó, a textile designer and applied artist of Transylvanian origin – who has lived and worked in Gödöllő, Hungary, since 1983 – is an artist with a wide-ranging practice in applied art and textile design. Since the second half of the 1970s – after completing her studies in the textile department of the College of Fine and Applied Arts in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) – the principal focus of her creative work has been the design and production of lyrical tapestries composed of stylised natural motifs, delicate silk garments, and woollen garments embellished with restrained ornamentation. Her workshop produced large-scale textile wall hangings created using the classical technique of tapestry weaving, as well as garments, garment-sculptures made from unusual materials with virtuoso sewing techniques, works that attained an almost independent sculptural quality. The distinctive visual world of her tapestries, garments and garment-sculptures, radiating beauty and solemnity, emerged from the duality – and harmonious synthesis – of motifs rooted in folk-art traditions and applied in perfect harmony with material and function, on the one hand, and the expansive elegance of Art Nouveau forms, on the other.
During the succession of Katona Szabó exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s, which presented magnificent textile works and brought unequivocal professional and critical success, an unexpected turn was nevertheless taking shape. Her first works in leather still appeared among the textiles – the initial pieces demonstrating her use of the new material were leather garments, followed by perforated leather pictures – but at her solo exhibitions in the new millennium, works conceived in this new spirit completely displaced the textile compositions. Katona Szabó’s 2003 exhibition at the Vigadó Gallery in Budapest was already organised around the enormous and justifiably monumental leather composition Fal (Wall). The creation of this work also brought her artistic dilemma to a close: textiles gave way to works that required new methods of working the material and the application of new techniques, introduced a new artistic language, and differed sharply from her earlier textile pieces. In this way, Erzsébet Katona Szabó – to my knowledge, without a counterpart in contemporary Hungarian art – undertook to revive a long-abandoned artistic tradition. She connected with a historical current, or rather branch, of the extraordinarily diverse craft of leatherworking, which originated in the East and became widespread in medieval Europe, and which can most accurately be described as the art of leather tapestry. Its finest surviving examples from the Middle Ages are found in Spain and Flanders, although we also have evidence that such works once existed in Hungary. One further point is important: the design and execution of leatherwork also played a prominent role in the oeuvre of several artists of the Gödöllő artists’ colony, active in the early twentieth century and so important to the development of Erzsébet Katona Szabó’s own oeuvre – among them Sándor Nagy and Leó Belmonte.
Erzsébet Katona Szabó’s leather compositions demonstrate a variety of methods of working the material and unusual technical procedures that determine their form and create the aura of the works. Pieces made using collage techniques can be distinguished from those executed by perforation, while a third group comprises works in which the artist employs these two essentially opposing methods simultaneously. The collage technique is a so-called additive method of constructing the work. Small pieces of leather are placed beside or on top of one another and sewn together, building up the composition both across the plane and in depth – either as what may be regarded as a unified flat surface or in an almost relief-like manner. A perforated composition, by contrast, is created by breaking up the flat surface of the leather through subtraction and cutting. It thus acquires its final form through the remaining surface, the voids created within it, and the patterns, abstract forms and concrete representations delineated by these voids. In these works, an important role may be played by the background – which may itself consist of another perforated leather surface – or by light shining from behind the work. Alongside these works of clear construction and structure, there are naturally also complex, intricately woven compositions built up in collage-like fashion and then perforated to form lattice-like structures. By opening up individual areas of the layered surface constructed through superimposed appliqué-like elements, they reveal mysterious depths, thus making the complex system of surfaces and spaces, planes and sculptural forms the essential problem of the work.
Naturally, the interpretation and description of Katona Szabó’s works cannot be considered complete based on such a simple classification. Numerous other formal elements must also be examined. These include the textures and surfaces of soft leather that suggest a velvety touch, and the methods by which naturally draping or drum-taut pieces of leather are joined together: the network structure created by mosaic-like connections, generally assembled in rhythms of horizontal and vertical or diagonal divisions, together with the cut-out negative forms of the perforations, most often bounded by curved contours. We must also analyse the compositional elements that form actual, legible texts and those that appear as calligraphic motifs. Once all these components have been taken into account, we may conclude that everything – the collage-like construction, the perforations, the combination of the two methods, the treatment of the surface, the network structure, the lattice-like quality, the relief-like layering, the projections, and the opened inner, rear or subsurface spaces – is dominantly and distinctively characterised by a dynamic visual effect brought to life through colour: a remarkably subtle, balanced and soft palette of russet browns, deep greens, dark blues, raven blacks, ash greys and lead greys, at times complementing one another, at others highlighting and intensifying one another. The artist’s restless creative attitude and constant search for new possibilities is reflected in the fact that, alongside her leather works, in the years following the turn of the millennium she turned to paper collages and calligraphic compositions quoting Shakespeare’s sonnets, inscribed on pressed, painted and crumpled sheets of paper. Considering that poetry and the writing of poems have accompanied her work from the beginning of her career to the present day, this development can hardly be regarded as an unexpected turn.
We may consider the task of describing – or rather circumscribing – the works broadly complete, yet we have not said a single word about the world of phenomena and meanings embodied in Erzsébet Katona Szabó’s art. Her individual works and those arranged into cycles and series evoke natural phenomena and elements – at least in their titles and thematic worlds, they relate to such spheres of meaning as the sea, gardens, islands, rain, days and nights. Yet the explicitly designated subject matter is merely an artistic point of departure, a kind of associative source from which a terrain for exploration opens up to both artist and viewer, offering the prospect of inexhaustibility and an unexpectedly vast world of interpretative possibilities. Katona Szabó’s textiles, leather tapestries, leather collages and leather sculptures – together with her paper collages and poems infused with gentle lyricism – open up, or close off before us, the real and virtual spaces of a mysterious, secretive world permeated by the promise of the unknowable. Within this world, or standing before it, we must find our way by relying on our innermost intuitions, so that in some Titkos kert (Secret Garden) or Álmok kiskertje (Little Garden of Dreams), the great encounter may finally take place – an encounter with ourselves.
[2012]