“Your body is an unbearable shell,
if there is no one to speak for you, if you have no words:
a creature that is neither flesh nor spirit,
defenseless and speechless.”
(El Kazovsky: The Order of Things)
El Kazovsky (1948-2008) was a painter, set and costume designer, poet, and performer, whose oeuvre at the end of the 2000s elevated her to one of the most outstanding figurative artists of her era. Although literature was closest to her heart—in his own words, “language flowed through her veins” – her legacy, composed of radically different genres and aesthetic qualities, reveals the creative intensity of an unavoidable interdisciplinary artist, who is unanimously recognized and appreciated by his contemporaries working in a wide variety of artistic fields. Her posthumous exhibition, The Shadow of the Survivor, held at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2015-2016, was one of the most popular solo exhibitions, attracting 30,000 visitors.
Her creative career began in the late 1970s with the Dzsan-panoptikum performance series, which combined the classical approach to painting and sculpture with a performative style: the combination of music, text, and movement (dance, pantomime). This led to the creation of surreal compositions reminiscent of theater sets and performance spaces, featuring his characteristic angels, Venuses, ballerinas, swans, nymphs, and mummy-like figures. She was primarily interested in classical mythology, so her paintings feature recurring themes of her personal relationship with death, the incompatibility of desire and everyday life, vulnerability, and general helplessness, which defined and accompanied her entire life. From the 1980s onwards, the figure of the dog appeared as a constant motif in his paintings, serving as a symbol of the soul or a moulded conscience, carrying both the metaphor of tragic fate and the symbol of survival.
El Kazovsky was transgender, to use today’s terminology, although she did not live as such in practice. The fundamental experience of her life was the question of gender identity, which had a profound influence on her and defined her. This was not only a matter of intimacy, but also the starting point for her self-identification, and thus one of the main channels of her art. Fluidity, the dynamism of changing gender roles, and the accompanying tension between body and soul — along with the rejection of binary categories — were all directed toward the search for self-identity. Perhaps the most serious evidence of this is the statement made by the artist in an interview with Júlia Váradi in 2005: “It wasn’t me who contradicted the world, but we contradicted each other.”
Through her uncompromising attitude, raw total artistic vision, and linguistic radicalism, her works were able to speak with unparalleled authenticity about people’s most secret desires, suppressed emotions, and fears. Her legacy, beyond the traditional iconography of bodies and the intense drama of their assigned progressive-erotic roles, pointed to the pettiness of gender stereotypes and the paramount importance of self-esteem and unshakeable self-awareness in the search for identity, which are the smallest building blocks of the self of an artist or aspiring artist.
The material in this exhibition was compiled from art collections where the majority of collectors had personal, friendly relationships with the artist. We attempted to bridge the gap between the artist’s enormous oeuvre and the modest space of the Godot Gallery by drawing on as wide a spectrum of her work as possible, both in terms of time and genre. From her college years, there are copperplate engravings and collages, early lyrical works, the fullness of the 80s and 90s, box works, application works created from installations, two pieces from Frieze I, which filled the Karinthy Salon, and two pieces from Frieze II, a summary series created before the artist’s death. What makes our current exhibition special is that all of the works are available for purchase. In addition to El Kazovszkij’s works, the exhibition also features the artist’s writings: we have selected excerpts from countless interviews with her (1987-2008), where, in addition to the topics that preoccupied her and are familiar to many, we can learn her opinions on conceptual art, the Sex Pistols, silence, life after death, and his travels, among other things.