Essl Award Winners, Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg/Wien, A / 2007
Essl Award Night, Ludwig Museum (Museum of Contemporary Art), Budapest / 2007.
1.
The first art piece is a “white cube box“. Its outward simplicity hides an inward miracle. Looking inside, a painting appears showing the artist’s body in a trunk.
The shape of the body is reminiscent of the embryonic position or of contracted burial – an attempt to just fit into the given space. The body is with its back to the observer, as if he was looking into another world with no notion of the observers’ reality. The birthmarks on his back form a shape of the constellation of the Virgin referring to the artist’s birth.
Thus, the box is a tool of transition, a transporting vehicle to a different dimension. This idea forcified by the two-dimensional, hyperrealistic painting. The mirrors inside the box create an infinite number of copies of the body. The profane interior is broken and the space is expanded.
The box is a conception of the universe. In other words, the world is placed between heaven and earth, or the top and the bottom of the cube.
2.
The second box is a “white coffin”. It holds a winding sheet, the projected picture of the deceased as it was permeated into it. The artpiece correlates with the Schroud of Turin and the Image of Edessa, the holy relic moved to Constantinople in 944 A.D. in a case very similar to the Hungarian wooden case „szökröny“. The work commemorates the simple yet universal miracle of birth, life, and death and creates awareness to a seldom emphasized and slowly disapperaring sacral aspect.
