Mária Flóra Zoltán’s artistic development was exceptionally hindered and poisoned by the murderous nature of the 20th century’s oppressive regimes. “My childhood and youth were terrible,” she recalled. At the age of sixty, she began painting anew, freed from all burdens and constraints. Her resilience and her steadfast commitment to painting serve as a cathartic testament to survival, to shaking off the shackles of inherited trauma, and to the liberating power of art.
Her first retrospective exhibition, organized by the K2 Gallery, explores the process by which — defying fate — she broke free from the paralyzing grip of her inherited destiny and brought her life’s work to fruition. Her career can be compared to that of other female artists who were discovered late in life, such as the Cuban émigré Carmen Herrera, Etel Adnan, who fled Lebanon, Louise Bourgeois, whose work drew on childhood traumas, and Lee Krasner, who was overshadowed as the wife of Jackson Pollock. Mária Flóra Zoltán’s moment of glory has finally arrived—at the age of eighty-nine.
Mária Flóra Zoltán was persecuted first because of her origins and then because of her class status. As a young girl, she survived the Holocaust hidden in a convent in Budapest, while her upper-middle-class family was nearly wiped out in the persecution of the Jews. Clinging to her surviving mother, they tried to get by during the era of nationalization and Stalinism. They lost their family villa, lost their fortune, and became destitute.
As a “class enemy,” Mária Flóra Zoltán was not admitted to the College of Fine Arts in Budapest, but she was accepted into the one in Prague. After a two-year stint in the Czech Republic, she wanted to return home: by then, the acclaimed art student had been admitted to the painting program in Budapest. But even though she completed her studies in 1962, the lack of prospects at the start of her career, her traumatized family environment, and her maternal responsibilities coalesced within her into a silent depression. Her creative energy dried up, and she had no studio. Unlike her former classmates (Dóra Maurer, István Nádler, or László Lakner), Mária Flóra Zoltán — who had become a wife and mother — saw no progress in her career.
Although János Frank organized a successful debut exhibition for her in 1970, her time and energy were consumed by her family. In 1973, she fled to the West through a marriage of convenience with a Swedish ship’s captain. She got a taste of the pleasures of Scandinavian consumer society and witnessed contemporary art movements, but she soon returned to socialist Hungary after the relationship soured.
For decades, Mária Flóra Zoltán’s mother — whom she adored and idolized — did not influence her life solely in a positive way. “I wasn’t living my own life, but hers,” she lamented. After her mother’s death in 1997, however, a new world opened up before the sixty-year-old painter, as if the inherited fate woven from the PTSD of historical tragedies had fallen away from her. At sixty, she started all over again: freely.
Her originally figurative, expressive style shifted to an abstract visual language in 2013. She fell in love with an old French postcard depicting the Renaissance floor of the bedchamber in the Papal Palace in Avignon. This motif proved to be a fertile visual source for many years; abstracting from it, she painted one after another his loosely woven compositions of square patches set on their corners. In this liberated world, it was no longer the drama of inherited fate but rather tonal harmonies that built the compositions.
The geometric rhombus grid of the “Avignon period” gradually loosened, then gave way to boldly loose gestures, “formless” patches, and an explosively cheerful color palette. Mária Flóra Zoltán, now in her seventies, turned to tools typically used by the youngest painters, such as acrylic spray paint and oil pastels (oil sticks). She first applied the raw, graffiti-like, lightly scribbled gestures to sheets of paper, then filled three- to four-meter-wide open canvases with them. These images, brimming with expressive power, are not faded “Autumn Blues,” but rather the mature compositions of an eternally youthful artist — one who defies the laws of fate — returning to the age of childlike innocence. “Something of the childlike soul remains within me,” she said in the portrait film made for the exhibition, referring to her naive gestures. While creating, Mária Flóra Zoltán shuts out the outside world, cultural influences, figurative reflexes, and historical baggage, focusing solely on the inner promptings of her sense of color. The exceptional power of the rediscovered—childlike—freedom radiates from these spontaneously emerging, abstract gestures.
Despite her depression and the hardships of her life as a woman, Mária Flóra Zoltán had worked before. Looking back from the perspective of her later abstract paintings, these works also take on greater significance. Following her 1960s panels — which featured appliqué elements and sought mythical, fairy-tale role models — she created in the 1980s the long-sought-after female counterpart to the Hungarian New Painting movement. On her canvases — painted with broad brushstrokes and filled with expressive, scribbled gestures — the dramatic characters of her own life emerge. The recurring figures transform into the cast of a personal mythology, ranging from the protective blue lion in the convent to the trumpet player in a cowboy hat, who embodies the absent male figure. It is only when looking back at her defiantly youthful late paintings that one realizes how much she was in tune with the aesthetic register of the new sensibility (Heftige Malerei, Transavanguardia). Even if the freedom she found so late in life — only after turning sixty — allowed her, as a “long-life” marathon runner, to resolve her gestures and lead her to the joy of unfettered creation.