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By Hand...(cont.)

Riis’ work also includes jacket-shaped pieces that work like the skin of the upper torso, showing breasts and muscles, and which open to reveal an under-image of human organs.  He is thinking about tapestry as inset in clothing, presenting the body as clothing, available to try on.  His imagery has a confident fearlessness.    

The opportunity to see more than one piece by these two artists fulfills Stevens’ hope that viewers will understand something of the art in their personal visions; the authority of the medium gets communicated unhesitatingly.

The tradition of tapestry weaving in Hungary is not much more than a hundred years old.  The group represented in this exhibit includes members of the Hungarian Association of Tapestry Artists, founded in 1996, as we learn in a short two-page essay by their president, Ildiko Dobranyi, at the end of the catalog.  Most have studied at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts[5], and represent an aesthetic that has developed over the last half of the twentieth century, amidst war, Soviet domination, and recent challenges of the market. The group has the extremely good fortune to have articulate Edit András as a member of their team.[6] In a thoughtful and informative essay in the catalogue, András talks about each piece as well as Hungarian  tapestry in its international context, with references to the relationships between the Hungarian work and that of weavers more familiar to Americans.

Overall, the very large size of all the work is impressive; the Hungarian sense of tapestry seems to derive its definition in part from generous dimensions.  This is useful for American weavers to see, in that miniatures have become such a popular format.  Large tapestries take courage of a different sort. 

Both Ibolya Hegyi and Ildiko Dobranyi weave a sense of landscape that is spare – and which cannot possibly communicate its subtlety and power in a photograph.  (The problems of reproducing in print or for the screen have regularly plagued tapestry makers.)   Hegyi’s triptych Aquamarine in particular loses, in print, its subtlety and warmth, especially since she has used conventional materials without the sexy, technologically exciting fiber optic cable used in her ATB 4 entry. This landscape shows Hegyi’s typical meticulous attention to detail, and repays close examination.

 In Éva Sipos’ Meeting in the Snow, the tapestry maker’s mark gets emphasized.  She has centered an object (a feather? a stick?) in the midst of a rectangle in pale brown in the midst of an off white field.  No area of the tapestry is without the signs of age, no clean pristine space.  She is defying all of those who require crisp edges.  Age and the effects of time come across most forcefully.  Sipos is offering a chance to imagine up close, how a beautiful tapestry woven fabric suggests its future, its fraying and disintegration.  

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