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MMP: Emese Benczúr

10.10 1998 – 8.11 1998

Stockholm

Emese Benczúr has created a new work which alludes to the language of advertising in public space, but uses opposite strategies. On the left of the main entrance to Moderna Museet she has placed an advertising poster of the same format as an ordinary Swedish billboard but using blue shantung silk instead of paper. On this costly material she has applied barely visible letters in the same material and colour which make up the sentence, “The changes render visible the foundation”. During the period of the exhibition the cloth will be exposed to wind and weather and when the artist finally takes away the letters the surrounding cloth will have faded and assumed a new tone.

As in all Emese Benczúr’s work the process itself is of central importance – both as regards how the work originated and its development. In the present work she has chosen a material, which is associated with intimacy and exclusive, ritualised pleasure and she uses a time-consuming method. In contrast to the immediate effectiveness of advertising, Emese Benczúr stresses the importance of nuance: in both word and gesture, she underlines the slow work of the hands. “Patterns needed for life” is also mounted much longer than most advertising posters and is meant to take on the traces of its surroundings rather than to have any effect on them itself.

While Emese Benczúr’s work may be related to the work of conceptual artists like On Kawara and Roman Opalka, it also can be associated with a long female tradition. She mainly works with textiles, especially embroidery. Just like innumerable women before her, she embroiders words, but instead of the moralising and sometimes repressive statements of samplers, she embroiders short phrases that originate in her own personal experience. The kind of cloth she uses varies depending on the situation and the content of the words but her background as a painter has repeatedly led her back to canvas. All her textile works contain elements of a diary as well as of meditation and penitence. Using these elements the artist measures and controls time and space and through these, her own existence.

Emese Benzcúr was born in 1969 in Budapest. She has recently had one-person exhibitions at the Studio Galeria in Budapest as part of the series, Gallery by Night, and she is currently participating in Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg.

Curator: Maria Lind

Moderna Museet Project

Moderna Museet Project is an activity of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Artists are commissioned to make new work for the temporary project space in the Old Vicarage next to the museum on Skeppsholmen, for other situations and environments in the city of Stockholm or elsewhere.