The first prize winner at the 2019 Young European Ceramic Competition of Terralha, Hungarian ceramic artist Viktória Maróti (born 1990) creates virtuoso ceramic sculptures that evoke traditional weaving techniques, breaking down the borders between ceramic and textile design. The young talented artist and graduate from Moholy- Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest will be featured at the gallery in a first European solo show.

She loves the poetry of opposites, the fertility of oxymora. Trained at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Viktória Maróti shares with her famous predecessor a taste for experimentation and transdisciplinarity. In 1923, Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin featured the avant-garde artist’s Telephonbilder (telephone pictures) – works on enamelled porcelain “whose colours observe subtle variations according to the enlargement or reduction of the composition”. As for the young Hungarian ceramic artist, she has been attempting since 2018 to transmute porcelain into textile within a strange alchemy. Honeycombed geometric cones (Shelter, 2019-2023), meshes mounted on walls (Wall objects, 2021-2023), flexible woven cylinders (Woven Dissolve, 2018)… Viktória Maróti designs and produces series of ceramic artworks with the appearance of 3D textiles, in an array of colours ranging from black to white and from cobalt blue to pastels. […]

[…] From knotwork to interlace designs, Viktória Maróti weaves a web of intimately linked artwork: “When I get involved into my work process, my ideas come seamlessly and all my pieces are connected to each other like links in a chain. The touch aspect is essential to me when I create a piece. I feel like my hands are also my mind.” In this respect, this modern Arachne shares Paul Valéry’s view (L’Idée fixe ou Deux Hommes à la mer, 1932) that “The mind begins and ends at our fingertips…”

Myriam Boutoulle
Journalist and art critic
Translated by Marina Duval Matthews