Storage Break! 3. – On Several Strands

On Several Strands. Textile works from Kádár era

25 October 2024 – 31 March 2025

Curator: Enikő Róka

Consultant Curator: Gál Csaba

Location: Location: BTM Museum Kiscell, 1037 Budapest, Kiscelli utca 108.

Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10 am–6 pm

TICKET

This is the third exhibition of the Municipal Gallery’s Storage Break series. The aim of the series is to highlight and present the work of women artists. On the two previous occasions, a wide selection of pieces was exhibited, mostly by unknown or forgotten women. This time, however, we chose only five textile artworks recovered while we were reviewing our collection, and attempted to uncover the historical, political, artistic and institutional contexts of these pieces. The exhibition can be read in two ways: starting from here and moving backwards in time or starting from the Oratory and following the chronology. Both approaches weave the narrative into a dense tapestry of several strands.

Making tapestries in the workshop of the Arts and Crafts Company, 1966

Recorded by Mária Sziklás (MTI)
MTI Ltd. Photo Archive
12 August 1966. Jánosné Rábai and Éva Szentgyörgyi weave tapestry of Endre Domanovszky

We look into the influence exercised by Noémi Ferenczy, into the genre of woven tapestry and batik tapestry, their role in cultural politics, and the industrial and commercial background behind them. The subject matter, as well as the function of the pieces make it unavoidable to consider some of the issues surrounding contemporary architecture. The growing interest in tapestry at the time these pieces were created was closely linked to the need to decorate modern public buildings. While public commissions were to serve the purpose of direct or indirect propaganda, the pieces created on the artists’ own initiative also conveyed a similar spirit. The group of works depicting the achievements of modern architecture, urban planning and engineering (Ibolya Juris, Katalin Prepelicza, Éva Pintér), in a broader sense advertised the utopia of building socialism. The motif of Irén Szuppán’s tapestry can be seen as parallel with the questions of contemporary architecture (the so-called “tulip controversy”): the criticism of modern architecture and the question of the reinterpretation of folk motifs in the 1970s already marked the beginning of a new era. The exhibition Architecture and Tapestries, held at the Association of Hungarian Architects in 1977, is the last thematic unit of our exhibition, and the documents on display here testify to the ambition of artists in both fields to work more closely together.

Katalin Prepelicza (1930–2014)

Construction on the Valéria estate (Valéria estate, Construction), 1959-1960

weaved, wool

BTM Museum Kiscell – Municipal Gallery

Éva Pintér (1932–1995)

Shipbuilders (Red Ship), cca 1960

weaved, wool

BTM Museum Kiscell – Municipal Gallery

The fact that these pieces found their way into the museum, attests to the gradually changing concept of the fine art collection, re-established in 1959. Originally, the aim was to document the socialist development of Budapest, using contemporary art, but already at the beginning of the sixties, the scope of collecting expanded considerably. The Budapest exhibit would have been unimaginable without the monumental genres: public sculptures, interior and exterior decorations of buildings, or even representative tapestries. The first director of our collection, Vilmos Bertalan, a reviewer of applied arts at the Lectorate of Fine and Applied Arts, was an ardent supporter of the tapestry genre, so it is no wonder he went to great lengths to get the good pieces. The textile works in the focus of the present exhibition were acquired largely thanks to his efforts. There are two exceptions: the works of Mária Túry and Irén Szuppán, acquired in 1979, which already point in the direction of creating a collection that goes beyond the topic of urban history and is of national importance.

Ibolya Juris (1923–1997)

Construction, 1970

batik, canvas

BTM Museum Kiscell – Municipal Gallery

While becoming included in a public collection is certainly a sign of recognition for the artist, there is no guarantee that a piece will continue to be valued in the future. The names of the artists exhibited here have been largely forgotten, their works have now disappeared from public view, and they have been left out from art historical summaries: they got taught in a vacuum between the work of the renowned painters and tapestry designers of socialist modernism and the large-scale narrative of avant-garde spatial textiles, a trend that started in the 1970s. While Noémi Ferenczy became an undisputed part of the art historical canon with this borderline genre between painting and applied art, her students were relegated to the realm of applied art. The museological status these pieces held until very recently indicates their outsider position with unusual clarity. All of them were kept in a collection unit of secondary importance, reserved for the decoration of the capital’s cultural centres, offices of political parties and other public institutions. They have only recently become part of the core material of the Municipal Gallery.