The past four months I have been revisiting photos of art that I had seen prior to quarantine. I am comforted by the memories they provide me, and inspired to be looking at the art again. I cannot wait to get to see new shows again someday, but until then I plan to share some of the amazing art I saw prior to having started this blog, last November.

One of my favorite shows of 2019 was Klara Kuchta: Fibre Works 1968-1973 at acb Gallery in Budapest. These large works were reunited for the first time after an exhibition in Geneva in 1975. Kuchta was born in 1941, and studied at the textile department of the University of Applied Arts in Budapest between 1963 and 1968. She moved to Geneva, Switzerland in 1971.

“The works retrace the path that the artist has made between two-dimensional and three-dimensional thinking, on which she has explored depth, volume as well as the spacial properties of weaving with sisal.

Kuchta took an active part in the formal renewal of textile art in the sixties in Hungary, which allowed the medium to outgrow its traditionally decorative reception, its recurrent use as a tool for artistic propaganda, and to become a channel of abstract artistic expression that silently opposed the socialist realist style propagated and favoured by the Hungarian aesthetical ideologies.” (acb Gallery)

“While her early works realized in 1968-1969 already avoid any formal reference and combine textures, materials, gradient fields but still evoke ancient tribal tapestries, her weavings realized in the beginning of the 1970s – many of which were destroyed and lost – approach the surface with an organic sensuality…..” (acb Gallery)

The pictures barely do justice to the scale, texture and extraordinarily rich color of Kutcha’s work.