Retrospective exhibition of Eszter Balás

This will be the biggest show so far of the works of Munkácsy prize winner artist Eszter Balás. Her oeuvre includes medals as well as small and large sculptures. Looking at her art we see periods sometime side by side, sometime intertwined, ancient forms along with state-of-the art designs.

Yet works exhibited here never seem disunited since the clear forms so characteristic of Balás combined with the richness in ideas make everything she makes special, individual and extraordinary, inspite of its simplicity. Indeed she never has broken with figural art, only that she often uses geometric elements, and her figures are sometimes reduced to signs. As Csaba Sík wrote: Eszter Balás' portraits are monuments of the keen insight and the understanding love.

Her works make us feel that art is everlasting, and exists beyond human life and time. Her sculptures of gods and gates (One-winged Angel, 1988, Passage, 2000) examine the relationship between life and afterlife. One such sculpture stands on Erzsébet Square. Works interpreting the man-woman relation form a special part in her oeuvre: the difference between the two sexes as well as their union and bondage are emphasized (Androgynous, 1991; Face-to-face, 1991).

Besides small sculptures (made of stone, bronze, marble, terracotta and plaster of Paris) and monumental ones, drawings, too, will be exhibited, like the series of screen prints titled Drawings from the Subconscious. The motives of her shadow photos and computer graphics, also shown here, might be familiar from her sculptures. As many as twenty-one of Balás' works can be seen in public places in Hungary, Vietnam and South Korea.

A catalog of the artist's oeuvre will be available. The popular song writer-singer duo Géza Bereményi and Tamás Cseh composed a song for the occasion and Cseh will perform it at the opening of the exhibition to be held July 14, 2005, Thursday 6 PM.

"I don't like uniformity. For me, the world is rich in details. I look at the person I am portraiting and see landscapes and viaducts in his or her eyes. It is only natural: when I'm working, zillions of things go thru my mind. There are two of us working: the material and me. The world speaks to me thru the material, as it would speak to anyone who has ears for it. It opens for me and shows how infinitely rich it is." (Eszter Balás)