Recently, I made a decision that strangely resulted in the postponement, imperilment of a significant exhibition. It changed something that I had been waiting for very long, very much.
It happened so, that although I believe my entire career is a personal portrait, I bring in another point of view. My great-grandmother’s.
Since my birth, she had been recording the events she considered important. Simple sentences, data. For a very long time, I remembered it as a nice book. Now I took it out and glanced it over again.
It is different from the memories that have been told, and by the storyteller, emphasized and repainted.
This is coloured as well, of course. My great-grandmother’s parlance, her writing, underlinings, notes, etc., they all create interesting imagery, and thus, atmosphere. I forgot a lot of things, or remembered them differently. This is also an approach, of course. One of the many that makes the map of my family.
The diary follows the first 14 years of my life from 1965 till 1980. I have my favourite parts, but it is difficult to chose only one for the press-matter. Perhaps the words of the last pages:
“wants to be an artist”, or “Memci, my 84-year-old great-grandmother”, where suddenly she writes instead of me.
Thus, the title of the drawing and the exhibition became:
I write
She writes
We write
We write the present together.
The pictures of the exhibition are the printed and, with a red pen, superscribed, emphasized pages of the diary, pen drawings from the family album, paintings of emotions, they belong here, although the people on the pictures are not always family members of the main characters.
As they say, the resemblance may be accidental.
Agnes von Uray