Between 30 March 1 July Q Contemporary will present a rare exhibition celebrating Ilona Keserü’s 90th birthday that showcases her oeuvre from the 1960s to the present day in Budapest.
Q Contemporary’s Ilona Keserü: ALL exhibition pays tribute to the exceptional career of artist Ilona Keserü, who celebrates her 90th birthday this year. Rather than taking a chronological approach, the structure of the exhibition is provided by its focus on motifs and themes, allowing the artist’s work to be presented in the individual sections of the exhibition via relevant constellations of the dominant forms, techniques, and areas of inquiry manifested in the works of art.
Spanning a period of almost seven decades, the work of Ilona Kersü (who was born in Pécs in 1933) is widely known in Hungary. She is a leading representative of the generation of artists who began working in the mid-1950s. Her works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Hungary and internationally in recent decades, and feature in
several important public collections. Recent exhibitions of her work have achieved international acclaim and attracted significant attention in the specialist press.
One of Keserü’s most important, almost intuitive motifs is an undulating line with a distinctive arch at the centre, an outline that she came across on the heart-shaped baroque gravestones in the cemetery of the village of Balatonudvari. The shapes of these gravestones, with their wealth of associations, are present as regularly recurring elements in the textile reliefs she produced from the 1970s; in her later series of steel engravings and graphic reproductions; as well as in her paintings.
Besides her exploration of colour and the metamorphosis of individual motifs over time, she took inspiration from archetypal items of folk object culture and folk art, such as the painted wooden chests typical of Baranya and Zala counties, or from folk textiles, such as the rustic, homespun underskirts available on the markets of Pécs, which Keserü was not only familiar with but also avidly collected. She was among the first of her generation of artists to turn to needlework, which she used not as an applied technique (e.g., as decorative embroidery), but as one possible means of artistic creation.
By showcasing selected iconic works from her various creative periods, the exhibition traces the arc of Ilona Keserü’s universe from the 1960s to the present day.
