This year, the members of the Studio of Young Artists Foundation asked Nikolett Erős, curator and art historian, to propose the Senior shortlist for the Klára Herczeg Prize. The jury (Katalin Aknai, Sándor Pinczehelyi and Zsolt Petrányi) chose the winner from the three candidates.
The nominees for the Junior category were nominated anonymously by FKSE members, and from the resulting list a jury consisting of two invited guests (Gábor Kristóf, Eszter Dalma Kollár), one board member (Ádám Jeneseses) and two foundation members (Gábor Török Krisztián and Flóra Gadó) selected this year’s winner.
“Róza El-Hassan’s work since the early 90s has achieved outstanding results through her aesthetic and conceptual positions. The members of the Senior Jury recommend her for the prize because her work has addressed social issues over the past decades that exemplify the artist’s sense of responsibility and social engagement.
In the early nineties, Róza El-Hassan was concerned with plastic problems, with the relativisation of form, material and function. Her tense objects, her objects, her luminous fruits have brought her professional recognition, including in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale at the Arsenale in 1993, in the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and at the Sao Paolo Biennale in 1998.
In the second half of the nineties, her art turned from conceptual issues to social issues, which were about artistic responsibility. This was the case with her sculptures on homelessness, his performances with Milica Tomic on overpopulation, or his installations that put Sik Toma’s human rights banners into an artistic context. In the first decade of the 2000s, Róza El-hassan worked with Roma communities to use their craft skills to create marketable design objects that could help them to make a living.
In the 2000s, Róza El-Hassan’s art gradually turned from Beuys’ “social sculpture” to the medium of drawing, in which she developed a unique, sensitive and poetic language. Her work summarises her earlier work in a symbolic system, but also includes political issues affecting Arab countries, especially during the Arab Spring in 2011 and beyond. Her works on paper and her drawings represent a specific period in her work, which still defines her creative activity today.
Since the beginning of her career, El-Hassan has been promoting internationalism and international communication of the artist in the domestic art scene. Her works, exhibitions and actions define art as a communal activity in which the creator, the recipient and the curator who communicates it to the wider society are given interrelated roles. Róza defines one of the artist’s most important roles as one of communication, as she uses her work to draw attention to visible and little-known problems in a way that generates active stances or assistance. The complexity and forward-looking nature of her work, as well as the solid quality of her work, lead the jury to recommend her for the Studio of Young Artists Senior Award.”
The Junior Jury has decided that the other winner of this year’s award is Luca Petrányi, for the following reasons:
“This year’s winner of the Klára Herczeg Junior Award is Luca Petrányi. The jury finds the award winner’s wide-ranging and interdisciplinary field of activity inspiring: as an artist, curator and organiser, she has been behind numerous initiatives and projects in recent years. While her presence on the scene as a visual artist is becoming more and more pronounced and her creative practice is exciting, as is her re-thinking and reinterpretation of different traditional materials and techniques – such as the re-thinking of textiles and batik techniques – we considered it equally important to highlight her work as a community organiser.
In the current unsupported institutional system, the initiatives that try to offer new alternatives and opportunities to the participants of the art scene in these times of crisis are exemplary. In Luca Petrányi’s practice, such as the Useless Galeri (with Fanni Solymár) or the organisation of the Bábel camps with several people. In addition, since 2020, as a member of the FKSE board, she has also invested a spectacular amount of work in the operation and activation of the association. In the person of the awardee, the FKSE community and the Hungarian scene in a broader sense have got to know an open-minded, enthusiastic, creative and determined artist who has persevered in the most difficult times for the right to exist and the validity of art.”