Woods and Ashes

Erik Scholz (1926-1995)

Curated by Dóra Maurer "... I have a certain inexplicable affinity for trees. I have lived among trees with a feeling of satisfied decency. I had to realize that from the inside I am a prehistoric human, who may have been a forest-dweller and thus a man of collecting nature. This is how I started placing figures among the trees. Men who were living together with ancient trees and plants like natives. It is a little bit as if they had caught site of and started staring at you - the spectator. I have numerous images with humans standing in rows." (E. S. interviewed by László Fábián, 1989) In his last few years of life, Erik Scholz gave up contemplating and modeling ideal and harmonic existence and started a protest through a series of emblematic and often mythological figures that projected forward his own fallibility as well as his consciousness of mortality. The formal world of these images is dominated by a passionately anthropomorphous mycological lace imitating the patterns of entangled roots where he used untreated wood-ashes to create broad gestures of gloomy lava. For the exhibition we have selected work from the two last periods of Scholz´s work. Dóra Maurer