Figures in reality

The work of Klára Rudas focuses on depicting, phrasing and framing possible ways of creating abstract structures and on investigating their ability to communicate and mediate. One important path has led her into is a search for potential contemporary means of relating to early avant-garde art.

Alongside traditional studio work, she has taken in the past her activity into the urban space, in one instance using the form of an existing urban space as a symbol, and in another, creating a spatial construction out of the description of a no longer extant Russian constructivist sculpture. She set up the latter – temporarily – in a space that had been transformed according to the preferences of the governing regime, a gentle provocation to induce the hierarchical system that defines the present milieu to show itself.

She writes about her work: ‘I am working on a re-interpretation of the concept of abstraction. I am interested in the present possibility of using abstraction simply as a method, for example as subtraction, and in the question of whether there currently exists a re-interpretation capable of getting beyond the dichotomies that abstract art has inherited from the history of modernism.’

Her work for her exhibition in Budapest was inspired by an artwork nearly a hundred years old. Rudas takes the constructional principle of one of Dziga Vertov’s Kino Pravda, a newsreel from 1922 and, lifting it from its original context, examines the question of how an abstract structure can relate to reality. In installations that go beyond painting in the narrow sense, Rudas outlines and elaborates possible interpretations of the mode of thought conveyed in the film. She thus presents various methods – abstract systems which, with varying levels of directness, take a view beyond themselves, outside the realm of painting.