Description
Mária Berhidi’s retrospective exhibition, opening in MODEM’s second-floor exhibition space, seeks to offer a comprehensive view of the artist’s somewhat elusive sculptural oeuvre, at once sensitive and sensual, conceptual and minimalist. Berhidi, who passed away last year, is also remembered through her personal and professional collaborations with fellow artists Mariann Imre, Ilona Lovas, Kamilla Szíj, and Erzsébet Vojnich, as well as her influential work as an organiser of artistic life. To honour this latter aspect of her practice, we have invited thirteen artists associated with her curatorial tenure at the Óbudai Társaskör Gallery to participate in the exhibition.
In her early period, Berhidi primarily created female torsos that expressed female sensibility, corporeality, and sexuality in a distinctive voice and on their own terms. These erotic works invite touch, transforming stone into a skin-like surface. They are typically precariously balanced, often movable, and always retain something of the stone’s rough surface, indicating the natural origins of both material and inspiration. Later, the torsos gave way to quasi-geometric compositions articulated in a minimalist formal language. In these works, Berhidi deliberately used discarded outer sections of stone from stone-processing workshops, pushing the material to the limits of its physical endurance. Her sculptures are “dangerous” and fragile, maintaining their balance in extreme ways. Around the turn of the millennium, her practice shifted towards spatial installations, and her range of materials expanded. Alongside stone, she incorporated wood, textiles, metal, and found objects into these monumental, often room-sized works, in which a personal dimension—also present in her early sculptures—re-emerged.
From 2007, Berhidi led the Óbudai Társaskör Gallery as an artist-curator for fifteen years. Her curatorial programme shared several priorities with MODEM’s mission. She supported opportunities for the youngest generation of artists and brought rarely exhibited bodies of work to public attention. She also provided a platform for distinctive voices in installation art and, in particular, contemporary sculpture.
The exhibition Remembering the Present offers an overview of Mária Berhidi’s unique artistic practice, while also presenting fellow artists of her generation and exploring connections shaped by her curatorial vision.
Exhibiting artist:
Mária Berhidi
Contributing artists:
András Cséfalvay, Ágnes Deli, Balázs Faa, Mariann Imre, Margit Koller, Endre Koronczi, Áron Kútvölgyi-Szabó, Ilona Lovas, Csilla Nagy, Sára Richter, Gábor Roskó, Ádám Szabó, Borbála Szanyi, Kamilla Szíj, Péter Türk, Ottó Vincze, Erzsébet Vojnich
Curators:
Szabolcs Süli-Zakar and Gábor Andrási
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