Function and Evolution in Porcelain Design | No one belongs here more than you – Presentation of Artistic Collaborations | Emotional Space – A Show by Katarina Sevic and Csaba Nemes | humancompositeinformative – A Show by Ákos Siegmund
REVIEW:
Eszter Ágnes Szabó: Function and Evolution in Porcelain Design
What with their brainwaves touting leds, memory sticks, and jewellery, contemporary Hungarian designers have a new way with old-fashioned chinaware. In our own 2011 it’s not just private and public places that change their functions but also a-changing are the many ways we live our lives, which includes changes in the things we use, which includes changes in the things we eat from, which prominently includes chinaware.
If all we know about crockery is that we want to be careful handling it we surely know a little more about family dinners, or even workday breakfasts.
Erika Rejka’s 2008 Herend porcelain pendrives first shown at the Designer Prize exhibition pointed to a direction since proving to have been taken. The designer looked for mundane objects whose coating could be replaced by porcelain. In a world of status symbols, those re-decorated objects proved to be excellent carriers of some valuable coating. Objects for holding business cards, PC mice, or fountain pens could teach the same old lesson.
We no longer use pipes, inkpots, or thimbles, but we do use laptops, pendrives, iPods, iPads, etc. whose surfaces can carry traditional messages just as well as open new vistas for planners in industry. Rather than developing the outer surfaces of our utensils of communication, lately, over the first two years of her Lajos Kozma grant, Erika Rejka has been making chains out of porcelain. What she shows to us is just an inetrmediate stage between function and fitness for an exhibition. She leaves the door open to a wide variety of usages.
Erika Sütő, too, is trying to smuggle in porcelain into our everyday array of objects by making porcelain wearable. To this end, she looks for new technologies and material qualities. When combined with elegant silver, her strict experimenting, her refined geometrical forms tend to strengthen a new role for porcelain, and also for jewellery. In the 21st century, innovative materials and technologies are valuable in themselves, and wearing them sends out a strong message in metacommunication. Although her pieces are necklaces and rings in the classical sense, they convey the kind of force which makes porcelain so expansive as to appear both as highly personal, and as part of architectural design.
Porcelain has looked for its functions in interior design and lighting technology for years. In 2009, Edit Kondor transformed a tower of cups into a bellglass, marking a sudden shift in function. A year later, Júlia Néma presented her porcelain lampions at the Executed Works exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Museum, but with porcelain extensions. When lit, the lampion projected the wobbling image of the burning fire onto the transparent porcelain surface.
Then there is Györgyi Kompár’s new, plastic generation of porcelain wall tiles issuing led lighting. Last but not least, Viktória Simon’s flowerpots look not only organic, and are nice to look at, but they also supply flowers with periodic helpings of water. Both indoors and out of doors, well-kept plants require some hard thinking and innovative design.
True, the prevalence in porcelain design of crockery is still there, but equally important is finding the sort of buyers who are ready to dress their dining tables with crockery dersigned by contemporary artists. What is needed is industry’s readiness to introduce young designers’ work into production, and the market. If all goes well, a new language of symbols will arise in the 21st century, but we, the buyers are also needed for that.
PREVIEWS:
No one belongs here more than you – Presentation of Artistic Collaborations
25 March – 23 April
Műcsarnok
Pairs and groups of artists invited to exhibit do so with works that also reflect on the venue they are shon in. Also participating are some workshops where architects, painters, media artists, designers or writers work together. Sound and space installations, theatrical paintings, art publications etc. pour forth a visual copiousness that resonates within itself. This is an exhibition that breathes like a festival; projections, debates, performances, concerts and partying will be part and parcel of the many things to be seen.
Emotional Space – A Show by Katarina Sevic and Csaba Nemes
23 March – 21 May
Knoll Gallery
Recent works by the two are preoccupied by the many ways in which we process and externalise our national identities. In his series of paintings entitled A Kurultai, Csaba Nemes has used photographs of people immersed in their ancient-Hungarian national identity at a festival held amid edifices erected in a supposedly ancient-Hungarian style. Katarina Sevic exhibits story-boards that feature ideas and symbols taken from documents and reminiscences – ideas and symbols that may well call long-standing national roles into question.
humancompositeinformative – A Show by Ákos Siegmund
24 March – 19 April
Neon Gallery
The young painter Ákos Siegmund accomplishes a drilling deep behind the blue props of techno-modernity. Like his earlier shows, his present one is based on photo-realistic foundations. Individual pieces are united by his trademark ozone-blue surfaces referring to the limits, or indeed the limitlessness, of our common visual universe.