Phone Tag: Interview with Sári Ember

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Linnea

*Glorious times*, Karlin Studios, Prague, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Ani Molnár Gallery

Sári Ember works in stone, clay, and fabric to create sculptural installations that evoke human culture across time and place. The Budapest-based artist brings her personal experiences to archetypal forms, which equally allow the viewer to see their own inner worlds and associations in the work. In this Phone Tag interview, we discuss collaborating during the pandemic, how time in Brazil shaped her as an artist, and her intuitive working process.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

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Linnea West: What are you working on now?

Sári Ember: Strangely, I haven’t been working for several months now. I decided during the pandemic that, as everything is postponed, I would just make what I was longing for. I took a sabbatical. It was very good. But now it’s nice to have some deadlines, and I’m excited to get back to work. I will have a dual show in October with Eszter Kállay.

She’s mainly a poet, and also an artist. I invited her to do this show. She would present her poems and I would show objects. It’s nice that this has been a process that we started in February. During the quarantine, we exchanged emails. I like that we had this long preparation period and dialogue.

I was due to have a solo show in the gallery which represents me—Ani Molnár Gallery. I had this idea: I wanted to do something about my grandmothers. My last grandmother died a year ago so now, therefore, all this generation is dead. I’ve been dealing with the death of my grandmothers a lot. I was very close to both of them, and I’ve been very close to their problems somehow too.

I was thinking about how they influenced me, the life they lived, and through their point of view how they can understand my life and my problems. I’m often nostalgic or admiring some things from their lives. I feel a lot of love and anger, pride and shame, in my connection to them, which is connected to the female roles they had to play, and the roles I do not want to play.

I very much felt connected to Eszter’s poems. They are in first person; they are both very everyday and celebrational at the same time. I felt my grandmother’s presence and related questions. The presence of her own body. Not only her mind, but also her body, how it is present on the street. What does it mean, a female body? I’m making big ceramic vessels and vases, black and grey with some drawings on them. There will be some androgynous and female figures in different situations painted or drawn on these vessels. It’s still in progress.

*Pouring water (Black)*, 2020, ceramics, 0.3 x 5.4 x 5.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ani Molnár Gallery

LW: Do you think the work is different because you have been collaborating with Eszter over such a long period of time?

SE: I don’t know if it’s different. I didn’t have different ideas about the exhibition, but I’m more confident about it. I understand it more. I am more involved in her poems, and she’s more involved in my works or my way of thinking, and this led to a very subtle selection of works, where I think the texts and objects will communicate in a way that it can create a new understanding for both.

LW: I wonder if that’s a silver lining of the pandemic, that when you take more time you can have deeper relationships. I often feel like I’m having conversations with people now that are very real, very intimate.

SE: It’s strange that when we do things fast and more superficial way, they still often happen. Exhibitions happen, and events happen. It feels so good to do it with more attention and more time.

*Pile of eyes*, 2019, marble, granite, lime stone, 26 x 26 x 6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ani Molnár Gallery

LW: Who has influenced your artistic practice? That doesn’t necessarily have to be an artist, just anyone who influences how you approach your work.

SE: Actually, I think what mostly influenced my works are people close to me doing artistic work or other creative processes, such as architecture.

I was very influenced by my best friend, and a very good friend, who are architects; Zsófia Kronevetter also makes ceramics. She’s a wonderful, creative person. I learned making ceramics from her. It really opened new fields for me. I was very influenced by my ex‑boyfriend, Bruno [Baptistelli], who was the first artist that I knew so closely. Understanding his process was very important for me. We made this project CHANGE-CHANGE, a nomadic artist run space. We organized five shows, and the artists and curators were all staying in our house for a week and preparing the exhibition. It was a very intense and inspiring experience for me. It was like going to a residency, but people came to our home. Among them was Daniel Lie, a Brazilian artist, and they inspired me a lot. They are a Brazilian artist. We had an outdoor exhibition space, and one afternoon while preparing, they took a little pillow and said “I’m going to sleep there.” They slept there to see what their dreams are, how they wake up, what are their intuitions. That’s wonderful.

Now I am very influenced by my boyfriend. He has a very different approach to art. It’s very critical and deals with ethical questions. I’m very fond of his way of thinking, which is very different than my process.

When I was in Brazil from 2013 to 2015, I was overwhelmed by the Brazilian art scene. I saw a lot of exhibitions, and I was in touch with lots of artists. The art scene is so open… Of course, it has its limits, but it’s very open with the forms and how you express things. It’s very much about the thought and the intuition. For me, that was very much part of being in Brazil, to see how these people work.

*Blue vase with eyes (No. 18)*, 2018. glazed ceramics, 53 x 21 x 21 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ani Molnár Gallery

LW: I’m curious because you mentioned one influence is your boyfriend, and that he has a critical perspective in how he approaches his work. I wouldn’t necessarily use that word to describe your practice, but I do think you’re thinking of social roles to some degree, too. For example, when you think about your grandmothers, you’re also thinking about the role of women in society, but maybe it’s more from a perspective of how it feels to live it.

SE: Yeah, it’s true. My starting point is intuitive. I don’t read for my topics. I work based on what I experience. Whereas he researches. He reads about the historical context, studies, articles.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I talk about these topics in a very delicate and kind of poetic way. For me, it wouldn’t be my language to speak directly, because I like to approach more people with my work. Even with my opinions, I would like to leave more layers or ways of interpretation.

The forms or materials I use are very simple. Not simple, but I carve faces and figures in stone or ceramic vessels; these are kind of objects that we know well from ancient history. We make our own interpretation of these objects based on our point of views and connections to them. I really like that we don’t really know what they are. I like to provide this experience of my work, that you don’t really know what it is.

LW: Right. There’s an openness to that.

SE: Yeah. I like to keep that openness.

*Untitled (Mask No 6.)*, 2017, marble, 29.5 x 23 x 2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ani Molnár Gallery

LW: When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

SE: I think that was also in Brazil. I studied photography, and for a few years I was a photographer. I wanted to go to Brazil, and I was looking for residencies like an art residency, a photography residency. I found a close deadline, and I applied, and I got it. In Casa Tomada, we were eight international and Brazilian artists sharing a small studio space, and having some talks and visits together. It was the first time I was considered simply as an artist and not a photo-artist. It was very interesting for me. Also, it was the first time I had a studio, so I had a table outside of my home where I can do whatever. Then I started to call myself an artist. I wasn’t very confident. In the Hungarian language, if you say, “I’m an artist,” it almost sounds like, “I’m an asshole.”

[laughter]

It sounds pretentious. At that time, all my artist friends, I asked them: “When they ask you, what do you do, what do you say?” Then they said, “I say my practice is painting.” Or, “I am doing a graphic work,” or, “I’m making sculptures.” [laughs] No one really said, “I’m an artist,” which has many layers. It’s about confidence. It’s also about the prejudice you get. “OK, but what do you do?”—I mean, you can’t make a living off it. It’s your hobby, practically, or your passion.

LW: You mentioned having a studio for the first time, and now of course, you’re making objects. I’m curious… is your practice largely studio-based? What’s an ideal day in the studio?

SE: My practice is not very studio‑based. I had a studio, and then for a year now I haven’t had a studio. I was away for residencies too, so I decided to just have a storage for some time. But now I will have again a small space. Otherwise I work at home. I make the ceramics at home. The stone pieces, I plan on my computer, and then I go to the stone carver and I choose the stones. I don’t actually make them, but there are smaller pieces which I bring home. Then I can live with them a little to see what to do with them. I would like my work to be more studio‑based but it’s mostly my sketchbook and computer and kitchen table.

LW: Are you able to do all the ceramics at home?

SE: It’s quite good to do at home because with ceramics time is very important. I let something dry for two hours, or five hours, or half a day, or one day. Then I do another step in the process, which might be 10 minutes, but I have to do it at the right dryness. It’s good to do it at home. Then I bring it to fire somewhere else.

*Leporello with lying figure in green*, 2019, marble, 130 x 50 x 22 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ani Molnár Gallery

LW: That makes sense. My final question is my favorite because people have a lot of interesting answers. Do you think as an artist, it’s more important to be in a big city—a place maybe like Budapest, or New York, or whatever—where it’s busy and there’s a cultural scene and there are galleries, or to be in a smaller place where you can focus on just making?

SE: The ideal would be to live in the countryside. To have space and time and calmness, no distraction from work. Then spend two months in New York, or London, or whatever. It’s interesting because Budapest is somewhere between the two. It’s a small city where many things are happening but not the big important things.

It’s calm, but then it’s not super calm. It’s somewhere in the middle. Actually, I quite like it. Recently I’m not longing for too much inspiration, to see other artworks or concerts. Mostly, the input is tiring to me, so I’m very selective now.

LW: There are moments where I really miss seeing art. But I don’t know if I need it as much as I thought I did before the pandemic started.

SE: True! I think at some point in the next months I will miss seeing art and travelling a lot.

I remembered one more thing for the studio practice, that there is one thing I do in the studio that I can’t do at home. Since Brazil, I have a practice of making collages, even if I only do thirty a year. It’s a very nice, loose way to think about new works and projects. It’s a very different material. It’s not stone; it’s not ceramics; it’s two‑dimensional. It’s the abstract, third version of my work and it’s very free to make them. That, I miss a lot. That’s why I would like to have a studio again.

LW: That’s great. Thank you for participating in this interview.

SE: Thanks.

*Untitled (white marble half mask on black – king)*, 2019, paper collage,
16.6 x 11.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ani Molnár Gallery

Process as a Guiding Line: Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Linnea

Two sheer and twisting rectangles fly across the wall, casting a shadow. Yellow seems to overlay the blue layer to create a green swath down the front. The work Overlappings 38, in the final gallery of the Dóra Maurer exhibition at Tate Modern, seems to take the history of geometric abstraction and do a joyful grand jete. How did we get here? The 35 works in this retrospective chart a processual and conceptual path across approximately five decades of making to reach the joyful state of this 2007 work. Form and color seem to float, transcending repressive policies of the Socialist Hungarian government in the earlier half of Maurer’s career and the ongoing understanding of abstraction today as a legacy of a Western, male-dominated Minimalism.

Installation view, *Dóra Maurer* at Tate Modern, August 5, 2019 – July 5, 2020

The exhibition manages to tell the story of Maurer’s long career with a relatively tight selection of work. Maurer is known as a Conceptual artist, working in Hungary in the Socialist period when such approaches (or anything not Socialist Realist) were not supported by the state. The first gallery presents Maurer’s wry humor in response to the repressive environment, her process-based work–obsessed with perception, and the milieu that she worked within in Budapest. Hidden Structures I-VI shows the elegant and minimal forms that Maurer’s processual structures often take in this early period of her career, where she was settling into a life making and teaching art in Budapest. Hidden Structures consists of six white sheets of paper, folded and then rubbed with graphite across the top third. Each one is folded like the one before it, plus one additional fold. The folds create the impression of lines in the absence of mark making, and the composition grows in complexity as this process is followed. This reductive approach–exploring what could be done with simple pieces of paper and graphite in the absence of drawing–becomes elevated through precision and care into an elegant, almost metaphysical, consideration of what a drawing can be. The light and tangible presence of the works, encased so that their delicate three-dimensionality comes through even framed, makes them feel like an embodied thing rather than an act of representation.

Dóra Maurer, *Hidden Structures I-VI*, 1979

Beautiful, surely. What kind of otherworldly realm does it operate in? Certainly not one that evokes the Socialist context of Budapest at the time, and the restrictive view of what art should look like (representational, populist) as determined by official government ministries. To make art so otherworldly in a system that demanded the production of Socialist Realist images is in itself a rejection of that political system and its demand on art making. In the same room, we also see a clear engagement with the political context: KV’s 1st of May Parade on Artificial Ground from 1971 is a sequential series of photographs focused on a young pair of legs coming out from a skirt to walk in a circle in a room, trodding over a rectangle of mushed paper for a quarter of that repetitive journey. You see that it is repetitive because of the depth of the path through the paper and the wet, dark marks tracked over the rest of the circle. Maurer photographed a young neighbor walking over newspapers inside a room, in contrast to the customary marching in the public celebration of International Workers Day on the streets outside. The red ink used in the newspapers on this day tracked into a red circle, not registering as such in the black-and-white photographs but hinted at in the red border the photographs are presented in. This benign action confronts many expectations of the socialist society, by privileging a private singular experience over a public experience and by walking over the channels of official communication and their rhetoric rather than reading them.

The second room introduces us to Maurer’s work in film, produced concurrent to and in fruitful juxtaposition with her practices in other media. Given the sequential manner of Hidden Structures and 1st of May Parade, it makes sense that Maurer was interested in experimenting with film, a medium that it literally comprised of a series of stills. Three films of the 1970s–Troilets, Relative Swingings, and Timing–are on view in one darkened gallery, creating a dizzying experience for the visitor. These works retain an experimental quality and indeed were not shown as art works per se. Films like Timing, which depicts a pair of hands unfolding a light cloth in an otherwise darkened room until the cloth takes up the whole screen, relates to the folds and sequential structures of Hidden Structures closely, as if Maurer could effortlessly transition her experiments in process across medium. Spare and elegant, this seminal body of work from the 1970s–largely on paper or film, in black and white–is what is deservedly known and lauded today. What is exciting is the way that the exhibition continues into the present, giving testament to the evolution of the study of perception and process and to Maurer’s more recent commitment to painting.

The next gallery jumps through space and time in a fragmented, truncated way. Mirrors in cut wooden frames in 4 Out of 3 (1976) hang in front of a similarly disjointed wall composition 5 Out of 4 (1979), chopping up the space visually. Even here, the fragmentation of space is arrived at methodically, driven by an internal order. Both works challenge borders and where the visual experience starts and ends. This idea is perhaps best exemplified by the Buchberg experience of 1983 that shifted Maurer’s practice, allowing her process of displacement–a method where one color determines the next–to move on to a bigger scale.

Installation view of Dóra Maurer, *Space Painting, Buchberg Project*, 1982-3. Photo: Dóra Maurer. Kunstraum Buchberg. Image here.

In 1983, Maurer painted the tower room of the medieval Buchberg Castle in Austria from floor to ceiling, applying her process of displacements onto an architectural environment with sloped ceilings and changing natural light. Maurer describes this project as a key work in her practice. The displacement of color and line create the sensation that everything is off kilter–that there is no perspectival viewing point. In the exhibition, this project is represented in drawings and a fantastic Super 8 film that Maurer made to document the process of painting the tower room. The perspectival distortions spawned a new practice of “space paintings,” where Maurer projected grids onto folded photographs, creating overlays of pure color according to her system.

The final gallery shows work made as recently as 2016. Sweeping arcs and shapes come across the wall, with some overlapping of hue that further suggests a light, ethereal quality. The dynamism and seeming motion is generated internally by a logic that Maurer has been chasing for much of her career. Like kites in the sky, there is a freedom to these paintings that is ever so gently tethered to the earth. They seem to almost come off the wall or have been painted on a three-dimensional surface rather than a flat canvas. As someone previously familiar with the Maurer’s early work, one of the wonderful things about this exhibition is that it continues through to the present, giving a sense of the ongoing depth of Maurer’s artistic practice. Here as earlier, Maurer’s work is marked by a nuanced attention to perception and a combination of elegance and playfulness that is well worth a long look.

Dóra Maurer is on view at Tate Modern until July 5, 2020.

I am glad: A view into the Hungarian neo-avant-garde at Elizabeth Dee Gallery

Posted on July 7, 2017 by Linnea

Endre Tót, Very Special Gladness Series – I am glad if I can read Lenin, 1971-76

Tongue-in-cheek is an excellent strategy for flying under the radar while drawing your audience in, as both artist and viewer share the knowledge that the intended meaning differs from that of the surface. “I am glad if I can read Lenin” is just such a deadpan statement from artist Endre Tót in the 1970s, part of a series of black-and-white portraits of himself with captions that explore the gladness of advertising, picking his nose, standing in a public square, holding a sign, or scratching his butt. Happiness–or the sarcastic recollection of it–over performing basic actions highlights the restrictive atmosphere of the times. Of all the artist’s conceptually driven works, these wry skewerings of the limited room for personal agency under the Socialist Hungarian state point most directly to the context in which Hungarian artists worked in the 1960s and 70s. Paradoxically this limiting context also created a freedom from commercial incentives and a camaraderie that is abundantly on view in a group exhibition currently up at Elizabeth Dee in Harlem.

Installation view, With the Eyes of Others, Elizabeth Dee Gallery

“With the Eyes of Others,” a survey of Hungarian neo-avant-garde art at Elizabeth Dee offers a balanced and broad presentation of work made during the 1960s and 70s, work that often seems as fresh and complex today in the context of a New York gallery as it did when it was made some 50 years prior in Budapest. The neo-avant-garde refers to the second wave of Hungarian artists who pursued radical artmaking strategies, from the 1950s through to the regime transition in 1989, drawing on the historical strength of the avant-garde of 1920s and 30s. The 1960s and 70s became a high point, mythologized today around an aging generation of counter-culture figures who, with the regime change, found themselves re-categorized on the permitted and, indeed, lauded side of the art scene in Hungarian society. While such a focus might seem like a historical niche, the works on view compellingly make the case for their international connections, linking back to American artists such as Robert Smithson, as well as charting specific territory related to making art under a repressive government that officially supported Socialist Realism as part of its cultural policy. Here, instead of positive, monumentalizing depictions of everyday life that glorify Socialism, you find a wealth of avant-garde artistic strategies designed to resist such placid narratives.

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The most arresting works on the ground floor are large, hard-edge abstractions, in painting on canvas but also on metal or in tapestry. Ilona Keserü’s incredible, well-preserved tapestry recalls painterly abstraction in a craft medium as well as traditional Hungarian folk designs for graves. István Nádler’s painted abstractions recall earlier avant-garde figures such as Malevich as well as the Hungarian Lajos Kassak in their geometric manipulations of space and planes that still recall the touch of the hand. Ágnes Berecz points out in her review in Hyperallergic, although there are clear connections to abstract artists working in the West as well, “what makes the exhibited works unique is their often veiled yet inescapable politics.” The political import of these abstract works, pointedly not Socialist Realist, contrasts greatly with Western ideas of abstraction as a withdrawal from politics, as notably promoted by art critic Clement Greenberg in New York.

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Upstairs, a fantastic but dense group of conceptually driven works are on view, representative of the many figures who were important in the Hungarian art scene during these decades. Work by Katalin Ladik, Miklós Erdély, and others finds a performative use for photography, documenting actions that could not easily be shown in Socialist Hungary. An exception is Tamás Szentjóby’s 1972 action Sit Out/Be Forbidden, documented here by three grainy black-and-white photographs that show a long-range image of the artist sitting in a chair on the street, having put his belt around his mouth. The artist did so knowing that the act would be considered subversive by the vigilant Hungarian police. Accounts differ as to whether police arrived before or after Szentjóby left, an example of how mythmaking has grown among this now-legendary group of artists, who have been canonized as artists of resistance. In contrast to this confrontational attitude, consider the more lighthearted resistance of Endre Tót, who employs the phrase “I am glad” frequently in his works. While the tactics used differed from artist to artist, the unofficial art scene was united in its pursuit of radical avant-garde strategies, and the many methods were all valid tools in the hands of artists looking for new forms of expression. While in places like New York, camps formed around different artistic styles, Hungarian artists, perhaps united by a common enemy, were a fairly close group.

László Beke, Handshake Action, Balatonboglar, 1972, Gelatin silver print, 21 1/4 x 15 3/4 inches

The work tucked just under the stairs, László Beke’s Handshake Action, a conceptual photographic grid documenting artists shaking hands at the summer getaway of Balatonboglar in 1972, speaks to that dimension of the works on view: they were made by a tight-knit avant-garde art scene interested in forming connections with the outside world. This grid marks the meeting of Hungarian and Slovak artists, a rare large gathering that stressed the solidarity of the Hungarian scene and its desire to be in contact with the art world outside of Hungary. This desire is likewise seen in the mail art of the period and the devout perusing of major art world periodicals such as Artforum. Despite real limitations, Hungary was not a closed circuit, and many of the artists on view had meaningful if limited tours in Germany and other European countries, at times also exhibiting there. However, with no commercial market to speak of and limited exhibition opportunities, work was made for oneself and one’s friends were the primary audience. The intellectual drive to experiment and create formed an atmosphere of surprising freedom within a repressive context. “With the Eyes of Others” provides the best gateway to into the complexity of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde that New York is likely to see for some time.

On view at Elizabeth Dee gallery in Harlem through August 11.