Kata Legrady

 

February 3–March 12, 2011

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Opening Reception:
Thursday, February 3, 5-8pm

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Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of photographs and sculptures by German -based artist Kata Legrady.

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Kata Legrady proceeds by collision, arousing a sculptural confrontation and symbolic encounter of two different worlds. On the one hand weapons of war and sweets on the other. In other words, a short circuit between lethal and harmless, a tension between childhood and destruction, between freedom from care and suffering. The choice of Smarties, a colorful sugar-coated chocolate confectionery, evokes the “colored dots” with which Roy Lichtenstein painted his large-format comic strips. The difference is, however, that the confectionary here does not serve to create representational images, but covering them with abstract ornamental motive that do not make them unrecognizable or unusable. In the hands of the artist, machine guns, grenades, handguns become strange and glossy, almost beautiful and attractive.

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The object obtained in this way can be shown as it is. It is exhibited presented under bell jar or glass as a curiosity or a powerful talisman, or it can be photographed. The scale can be changed in this way, enlarging the object to a great extent. It always appears frontally to the viewer, illuminated by an inflexible light, contrasted by an immaculate white background. This other way of creating distance only heightens the dumb and hypnotic presence of the transformed object; as if a precious hallucination. Images dominated by clinically precise, hauntingly vibrating colors; pictures, as the artist put it, of children-soldiers and other abominations.

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Kata Legrady was born in 1974 in Barcs, Hungary, currently lives in Hanover (Germany) and works in Hanover (Germany), Budapest (Hungary) and Paris (France).  Legrady’s exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery will be accompanied by a new book on her work titled “Bombs and Candies” by David Rosenberg, published by Skira Publishing House in Milan, Italy.  The book is distributed in North America by Rizzoli International Publication. “Art Game Book, Artists in the 20th Century” (Assouline Publishing, New York, 2010) is another book by David Rosenberg which will also accompany Legrady’s exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery, the book included Legrady’s work together with the works of artists: Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan and more.