ARTIST - WOMAN - FATE - The life of Klára Szilárd

As part of our series introducing women's art, a special kind of contemporary archeological exhibition elaborates the life of Klára Szilárd.

We introduce two parallel strands concerning the artist and her oeuvre. The curator, Zsuzsa Lovag, the retired director of the Applied Arts Museum, explored the artist's rich life from an archaeological viewpoint, which is at the same time an imprint of the vicissitudes of twentieth century history. Thus a selection of her mementos assembled onto tableaux, can be seen juxtaposed with Klára Szilárd's works.

Her path through life can be reconstructed from fragments of photographs, invitations, drawings and newspaper articles, whose driving motif - according to the artist's formulation - is "how much one has to go through in order to be able to do what one likes doing."
We present the schools of her Hungarian childhood and youth, which are followed by the period of emigration to Switzerland during the forties.

Her real period of fulfilment starts in Israel, the windows for synagogues are significant in universal cultural history, and we reveal for our visitors a few designs for windows, which have never yet been exhibited. He surrealist oil paintings, inspired by the desert, are also the result of the decades in Israel and they will be included in the exhibition.

Klára Szilárd's husband was a member of the Israeli Symphonic Orchestra and there was an active musical life in their home. The drawings which record this atmosphere are also on show. Klára Szilárd also had a very productive period after returning home and our exhibition closes with the abstract pictures painted from the nineties onwards.