In 2017, artist Eszter Tóth Anna Tóth discovered the sight of the now trademark dirty clothes pile as the fundamental artistic problematic of her creative process. The primary reading of her works is not the gendered examination, the representation of “female” housework and the metaphor of invisible labour, but the found object made into an artistic subject through the act of imitation/recreation.
The artist balances a researcher’s attitude on the delicate and experimental borderline between the conceptual ready-made (the banal, everyday pile of clothes waiting to be washed as an art object), the figurative (the easily identifiable visuality composed of the folding materiality of clothes) and the abstract (the free association triggered by colours and patterns), as Duchamp’s hallmark, to the extreme.
In these pseudo ready-mades, there is a continuous translucency, a metamorphosis, in which both the planes of the abstract paintings and the spatiality of the clothing installations dissect the subject of themselves. For how long does the dress, the image of the material itself, retain its original meaning, and when does it change into something else in front of the viewer?
In the current exhibition, the artist has reached a new turning point in his work. In his solo show “Patterns in Piles” in 2022, he explored the possibilities of the cloth pile to the point of exhaustion. The culmination of this was the complete enclosure of the gallery space, the white cube, by painting the walls with a motif of his choice. But how does the effect of his works change when he removes the most essential element, colour?
In her latest works, Eszter Tóth Anna Tóth has toned down her colour arsenal to a minimalist palette of black, grey and white monochromaticism to observe how her sculptures and paintings separate and take their own distinct paths. In place of his previous installations of half-pairs of socks dipped in resin, the artist makes the ‘cloth-ceramic’ sculptures ‘dress’ as infinitely subtle objects, making the material seem self-defeatingly airy.
In his new paintings, however, he departs from the original theme of the “Laundries” series: the collage effect comes to the fore, the gestures used here, his own and those of others, continue to evolve, hovering over each other on the picture plane, while they become a landscape of reliefs, influenced by the subtle distance between them, their converging lines creeping into each other’s picture spaces.