The Institute of Contemporary Art will present a major selection of works by Mária Chilf Munkácsy Prize-winning painter, as a highlight of the 2023 exhibition season.
Chilf’s works in a variety of media (painting, printmaking, photography, video, installation, community art projects) connect seemingly distant concepts and phenomena through sensitive associations. Her works, which explore the mechanisms of the human body and soul, are closely related to neo-conceptual art but also rely on intuition and layering, initially using organic materials and evoking biological illustrations. In the last two decades, her attention has increasingly turned to questions of the inner world of the human being, and her interests have focused on trauma, healing and self-healing, and memory.
The conceptual basis and organizing principle of this exhibition is based not only on the formal unfolding of the composition, but also on the rich variations in the use of meaning and symbolism, and the related investigations and questions. How do our patterns define our identity and frame our search for paths and balances? How and in what ways can we be bound by our family patterns that have determined the lives of generations, by patterns in education or work, or even by patterns of gender, origin, society or history?
Although the selection, organised in three sections in the ICA-D, focuses primarily on Chilf’s watercolours from recent years (most of which are a mature synthesis of watercolour and photographic printmaking techniques), but it also includes a selection of the artist’s early works – watercolours, photograms, installations – and offers a medially diverse overview that is considered to be a niche for the regional public. The large-scale presentation will also include the first exhibition of a new work by the artist, dedicated specifically to the Dunaújváros public.