„Born of slime and decay” – Exhibition of Stella KOLESZÁR and Eszter METZING

29th November – 23rd December 2022

Opening: 29th November from 6 to 9 pm in the presence of the artist. Opening speech: Imola Julianna Szabó, poet

In their first joint exhibition, Stella Koleszár and Eszter Metzing use their art to explore inner processes that have been in motion for more than a year now and have been evolving ever since. They have created an image of an imaginary cave, the damp interior of which reflects several pieces of reality. It echoes the wholeness of being; it plays with the stitches of pain, the dimensions of existence frozen in glass. The cave thus imagined is at once the dream site of the individual, the story of the tales woven by the collective consciousness, a symbolic space of archetypes, and the creation of the exhibiting artists’ private mythology.

The key scene of an epic of individuation explodes in the space, where the individual is on their way to discover their own spiritual aspects. As they become one with their own shadow side, banished to the terrain of the unconscious, they open their tear ducts to feed the promise of a final reckoning. The uncanny (unheimlich) tentacle-creatures that cover the cave walls are already heralding the end of the self-proclaimed exclusive Anthropocene world. Organically, it is all rotting into another ’subnatural’ reality, while in the Bataillean base matter, that is, in the slimy energy of darkness and irrationality, the womb of rebirth is swaying.

Annamária Szabó

Translation: Krisztina Heréb

(The title of exhibition is citation from Herbert Wendt’s book, The Sex Life of the Animals.)