CIRCLE - retrospective exhibition of Beáta Széchy

This retrospective exhibition of the graphic artist and painter Beáta Széchy celebrates her 55th birthday, and shows works from the past 25 years. The event is part of the Ernst Museum's Summer Program introducing the oeuvre of contemporary Hungarian artists, with special regard to woman painters, as is the tradition of the museum.
Beáta Széchy, who is living in the United States, started as a graphic artist but soon she took to using photos and textiles. While still in Hungary, she made works of sewn and painted multilayered paper that often depicted scenes, group photo paraphrases, memories and stories locked up in boxes. From the 1980s on she has been designing book art, using existing books for making sculptures. Széchy turns books into objects and sculptures, and uses the book as a symbol and metaphor. Also she has been making installations since 1992. Her first installation titled I Ching - The Book of Changes was inspired by the culture of the Far-East (Kala Institute, Berkeley, US).
Széchy graduated 1980 at the Hungarian College of Art, and in the late 1980s she moved to the United States. In 1990 she founded the Center for Hungarian Culture in Dallas to propagate her home country's culture in the US. In the mid-1990s, together with American colleagues she organized a colony of artists at Balatonfüred.
This exhibition shows drawings, graphic art, paper sculptures, collages torn, sewn and woven into squares, offset montages, offset prints made by transforming old photographs, screen prints, book objects and installations. For the occasion of the exhibition a book about the artist and her works will be published.