Margit Kányási Holb – Rituals Embodied in Material
2026. Jun. 14. - 2026. Aug. 09.
Margit Kányási Holb, recipient of the Ferenczy Noémi Award, began her career alongside the development of the Velem Textile Art Workshop, founded in 1975, which replaced a functional orientation with experimentation: the exploration of spatial, conceptual and installation-based possibilities. She developed a unique weaving technique and increasingly fused her craft knowledge with a sensitive approach permeated by the conceptuality of contemporary currents, so that utilitarian objects in her oeuvre gradually gave way to autonomous, meaning-generating works.
In her artistic practice, experiments with archaic weaving techniques meet a comprehensive understanding of textiles, and her works cross into the realm of visual artistic expression. Wool and felt images, objects, complex installations and performative gestures become parts of an artistic universe in which matter is both an active agent of creation and a means of interpreting the created world. In her mature creative period, she creates not decorative surfaces but event-bearing media whose properties shape the work. She foregrounds relationships between surface texture and spatiality, body and memory, material and psychic reality.
The use, shaping, activation and spatial placement of textiles often occur within the framework of action art. The related gestures – covering and revealing, binding and unbinding – go beyond technical operations as action-based, temporally unfolding acts of meaning-making, often alluding to the individual’s relationship to the community. Memories attached to the carrier, acquired expertise and the indescribable intimations of tradition – pointing toward the sacred – are recurrent sources of inspiration; in many respects, her work thus shows affinities with that of Ilona Lovas, who belongs to the same generation and also studied weaving.
Beyond the identity-forming power of physical, material and spiritual connections, the family of artists, as an intellectual milieu, also offers points of reference for interpreting the oeuvre. Her shared thinking with the visual artist Zoltán Fátyol – despite their different media and vocabularies – consonantly reveals the role of art as a spiritual mediator. Works made in collaboration with their daughter, Viola Fátyol, a photographer awarded the Capa Grand Prize, open up further perspectives in the artist’s career through the permeability between media and the visual presentation of memory.
Margit Kányási Holb’s artistic practice can enter into dialogue with current trends in contemporary art, in which the examination of materiality and the possibility of recreating the body (and its memory) or rituality play a decisive role. Her works treat textile as a source of expressive power in which the moments of concealment and disclosure, as well as the duality of touch and untouched purity, operate in parallel to convey existential experiences and trust in a deeper truth.
Curator: János Áfra