Zsuzsa Gesztelyi Nagy divides the vast space of FUGA’s Marcel Breuer Hall into two sections, presenting two interconnected yet entirely distinct bodies of work. She fuses her two series in a particularly bold manner, using the exhibition space as a meeting point. The starting point of her personal memory is her childhood in a housing estate, the motif of the balcony, and the symbol of the lamb relief in front of the school.
Memories, Spaces, Stories
What was it like to grow up in the New Life Park housing estate in the 1970s and 1980s? What visual fragments of memory influence historical memory, broken down by city, district, residential community, family, and the individual? As we wander through the fragmented memories and locations of a childhood once believed to be stable, we realize what experiences inspired Zsuzsanna Gesztelyi Nagy to conceive a sweeping series of paintings and graphic works. Gesztelyi’s visual world, her vibrant color palette, her sensual gestures, her sequin-embroidered paintings and prints not only transport us to the 1980s, but we also slip completely unnoticed into the vortex of an intense, collective emotional journey.
The buildings of socialism, the sculptures, reliefs, and mosaics of its public spaces emerge on the surface of her paintings. These motifs blend with archaic fragments of images, as if pieces of Pompeian frescoes had drifted straight from another time onto her canvases. Fragments of the past are placed side by side (painted, sewn, printed), forming an archaeological network of vanished worlds that comes together as a map of our inner world.
Dynamica Feminina
The visual tremor of the mother-daughter relationship commands such dynamic eye movement from the viewer that it draws them into the pictorial space like a vortex. The intense multiplication, condensation, distortion, and grouping of motifs break open the tiny, secret layers of the collective unconscious with the power of concentration.
The works give voice to women’s stories. Those of mothers, girlfriends, therapists — the women who sometimes help us understand something about our own lives with just a single sentence or a glance. As if invisible threads, twisted into an umbilical cord, were binding together the generations, the personal and collective past and present.