Mária Chilf
Sounds of Paper
curated by Eszter Lázár
19 September 2024 – 30 November 2024
Új Kriterion Gallery
(Miercurea Ciuc, str. Petőfi nr. 4)
Sounds of Paper
Mária Chilf’s solo exhibition at the New Kriterion Gallery offers a selection of her work from the past twenty years, focusing on themes and concepts that have been a constant element throughout her career, such as identity, trauma, dreams and reality, the human body and the environment, the family and collective memory. Most of the works are in watercolour or a combination of watercolour and photographic printmaking, which for Chilf is not only an applied technique but also a particular way of understanding: finding one’s place in the world and attempting to understand it. She traces found photographs (selected from family archives), cuts them out and then applies them to the watercolour surface in a witty and sensitive combination.
Throughout the twentieth century, family memories arrive in the present in connection with historical events and collective celebrations: they intersect, originate from or return to each other. The title of the exhibition, Sounds of Paper, refers not only to the fragile medium of the works, but also to the attempts to “sound” these works in a variety of voices, ranging from whispers to trombone solos. They are ephemeral, volatile, poignant, playful, and perhaps at times irregular and awkward. Chilf uses all the tools of technique to bring seemingly distant memories, images and phenomena closer together in the form of sensitive associations. These associations also offer Chilf the opportunity to test various ‘inherited’ family roles, chosen or offered identities on paper and in the imagination.
She was born in 1966, Târgu Mureș, Romania. She studied at the Painting and Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, in 2019, she earned a DLA degree. She has been teaching at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts since 2009, and is an associate professor since 2022. In 2019, she earned a DLA degree. In addition to numerous national and international exhibitions, her retrospective exhibition, entitled The Patterns Bind, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art – Dunaújváros in 2023, won the AICA Prize (Hungarian Section of the International Association of Art Critics). Her works are in numerous private and public collections in Hungary and abroad, including the Ludwig Museum Budapest, the Hungarian National Gallery, the Budapest History Museum – Municipal Gallery, Déri Museum Debrecen, and the Frauenmuseum Bonn (DE). In Hungary she is represented by VILTIN Gallery.
on view: 19 September 2024 – 30 November 2024
curated by Eszter Lázár
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