Márta Jakobovits: Part of the Road Travelled is on view at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest
December 9, 2021 – April 24, 2022
The Márta Jakobovits retrospective continues the MNAC series of monographic exhibitions focusing on artists most representative for the last five decades in the Romanian arts. The exhibition, which is at the same time an environment-installation and a presentation, for most of its part chronological, of the main stages and directions in her practice, showcases artworks from the earliest terracotta series from the ‘60s and ‘70s all the way to the newest pieces, exhibited now for the first time. Her oeuvre is one of the most complex, complete and applied researches on ceramic techniques—on modeling, casting and baking, from traditional materials and procedures which she rediscovers and reinterprets and up to experiments with the chemistry, baking temperatures and limitations of certain processes. She experiments with the particularities of ceramic paste, such as thixotropy, the time-dependant viscosity of porcelain, with various combinations of mineral powders and pigments and their infinite textures and chromatic subtleties, and she frequently extends her research on manual paper techniques and on practices such as installations, interventions and environments. This thorough study on the materials is paralleled by an observation / consideration of matter in its acceptations as receptacle of both content and the artistic will. These are two of the premises in her practice, centered on themes related to the birth and development of form, sign and symbolic charge. The origin and evolution of the visual sign is therefore always found in the dynamic between matter itself, with its particularities, the artistic intervention and a universal vocabulary of representation. From the recovery of an archaic, traditional and mythological fund and all the way to the discovery and affirmation of the connection between the natural and the spiritual, her work explores a dimension of the sacred which not only cancels any contradiction with the material but becomes operational only in its indissoluble tie with the substance. Series of works often initiated over 30 years ago are still ongoing, and are in a continuous reconfiguration. Her ensembles describe various trajectories, pathways that continue in logical successions of steps or close back upon themselves, roads that are open or reveal the stages of a growth that projects a different finality. Evolution, continuity, journey, ascension are themes central to her permanent exploration of the potential of ceramics—a material which contains the poetics of both malleability and hardness (and the dynamic processed in-between) and of a beauty which is intrinsic to matter, the images from inside of the substance.
Curator: Mălina Ionescu
Exhibition design: Attila KIM Architects
Special thanks to those who lent works: Dr. Kiss Andras (HU), Centrul Cultural de Artă Transilvania (RO), arh. Carmen & Ernest Pafka (RO)
Contact
info@mnac.ro
MNAC Bucharest
Palace of Parliament
Izvor 2-4 St., Wing E4
Bucharest 050563
Romania
Photos © Dani Ghercă / MNAC. Courtesy of the artist
