Remembering the Present – Retrospective exhibition of Mária Berhidi
2024. Jul. 20. - 2024. Nov. 10.
Mária Berhidi’s retrospective exhibition, opening in the second-floor exhibition space of MODEM, aims to reveal the full extent of the late artist’s somewhat hidden, at once sensitive and sensual conceptual-minimalist sculptural oeuvre, her personal and professional collaborations with fellow artists (Mariann Imre, Ilona Lovas, Kamilla Szíj, Erzsébet Vojnich), and her influential work as a curator. To evoke the latter, thirteen artists from his curatorial period at the Óbuda Society Gallery have been invited to participate in the exhibition.
In her first period, Mária Berhidi mainly created female torsos, presenting female sensibility, physicality, and sexuality in an individual voice. These erotic works, which demand tactility and transform the stone into a skin-like surface, are typically unstable, often mobile, and always retain something of the raw surface of the stone, indicating the natural origin of the material and inspiration. Later, the body torsos were replaced by quasi-geometric compositions in a minimalist formal language, in which the stone used – Berhidi deliberately worked with quarry waste, so-called ‘edgestones’ – was at the limit of its physical tolerance: his works are ‘dangerous’, fragile, and their balance is maintained in extreme ways. At the turn of the millennium, her art turned towards installations composed in space, and her use of materials became more varied: in addition to stone, wood, textiles, metal, and found objects were used to create these monumental, usually room-sized works, in which, as in his early works, the personal reappears.
From 2007 she was the artist curator of the Óbuda Society Gallery for 15 years. There is a lot of overlap between his curatorial programme and the objectives of MODEM. On the one hand, it promoted the youngest generation of artists and the presentation of rarely publicized works. On the other, it gave space to installation art and, in particular, to contemporary sculptors with an individual voice.
The exhibition Remembering the Present provides an overview of Mária Berhidi’s unique art and introduces her generational co-creators and the points of intersection of her curatorial approach.
Exhibiting artist:
Berhidi Mária
Contributing artists:
Cséfalvay András, Deli Ágnes, Faa Balázs, Imre Mariann, Koller Margit, Koronczi Endre, Kútvölgyi–Szabó Áron, Lovas Ilona, Nagy Csilla, Richter Sára, Roskó Gábor, Szabó Ádám, Szanyi Borbála, Szíj Kamilla, Türk Péter, Vincze Ottó, Vojnich Erzsébet
Curators:
Süli-Zakar Szabolcs – Andrási Gábor