Leseprobe | Screwing with Order

Gyöngy Laky Screwing with Order Assembled art, actions and creative practice

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CONTENTS Foreword

4-5

Origins and Influences

8-27

Jim Melchert Mija Riedel

The Architecture of Thought 28-49 David M. Roth

Drawings in Air Grids Vessels

50-77 78-93 94-181

Words & Letters Signs & Symbols Site Installations Abstractions Footnotes Quote Sources Captions Public Collections

182-211 212-245 246-279 280-297 300-301 302-303 304-325 326-327 7

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describes Laky as an “activist artist, feminist artist, social justice and environmental artist all in one,” but not in the way that someone normally would imagine. “If she is a social justice or activist artist,” added Hayashi, “then she can help redefine what people think of that.” 46 In truth, helping people to reimagine—art, design, craft, refugees, human rights, the environment and the unexpected—is at the heart of Laky’s work. As Kenneth Trapp observed in 2000, Laky “is an artist who is always making connections with the world beyond her art.Yet, in full circle her connections bring her back to her art.” 47 These days, her prescient vision for a more diverse understanding of the arts is on view in an increasing number of famous white cubes. In 2020, in recognition of two major exhibitions that featured craft at MoMA and the Whitney in New York City, critic Glenn Adamson wrote, “You can make a strong case that the long-standing marginalization of the crafts—and the self-evidently crazy idea that painting isn’t one—was just the art world’s way of practicing sexism and racism, barely disguised as a policing of disciplines rather than people.” 48 Her unceasing focus on social issues and the arts’ role in addressing disparities has made Laky’s work ever more relevant. Curator and painter Rebecca Taber sees that as the case, especially for younger artists “because of her risk taking, specifically with materials, and also the way in which she never categorizes herself. She’s a sculptor of our time because of those current questions about the environment, our political world…and she started off as an immigrant. She is that universal person that we all are, that we’ve forgotten—it’s much closer to home for her.” 49

Mija Riedel is an independent scholar writing about the arts and cultural icons.

Working on Mirror, Mirror, 1974 Working on Federal Art-in-Architecture commission, 1976, pp.284-285

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27

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The Architecture of Thought David M. Roth If you’ve ever attained fluency in a foreign tongue, you understand how re-ordering the basic components of human speech can alter thought and consciousness. So, too, does immersion in a foreign culture, provided it’s sufficiently different from your own. Such sensations are familiar to Gyöngy Laky. Since fleeing Hungary with her family during the Cold War, her life has been an ongoing journey. She has lived on three continents and traveled to 47 countries, becoming conversant in nearly a dozen languages and visual cultures in the process.

Her oeuvre, which reflects those experiences, defies easy classification. It draws on the history of indigenous people using found or harvested objects to create art and basic necessities; the 20th-century tradition of using found objects in collage, assemblage and sculpture; and the design and engineering principles that undergird contemporary architecture. “I can get as excited about a thatched roof in Switzerland as about a domed African home built of bent branches or about the dense grids of scaffolding when the Statue of Liberty was being renovated as I could about a woven cedar Haida hat,” says Laky. “It all seems related to how I think about my studio practice.” 1 Laky’s art includes nail-pierced baskets and drawings made of twigs; sculptures fashioned from salvaged agricultural and garden cuttings; land art installations; labyrinthine mazes built of wood and plastic toy figures, formed into words and symbols; and large-scale wall works composed of painted tree fragments that recall sign language and hieroglyphics.

Different as they are, these endeavors are formally and conceptually linked by the artist’s longstanding interest in architecture. In conversation and in 28

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Fronzola Piece, 1993 Detail of Rib Structure, 1988, p.104

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57

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Preparing to Walk, 1985

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102

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Dual Cycle, 1987

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Mehta, 1984

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103

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158

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Pipe Dream, 2007 Multiplied Thinking , 2007 Arboraceous, 2007

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159

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178

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To Dream, 2015

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203

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248

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“A self described ‘artist participant’ she explores our world in work that purposely creates tension, is ‘attractive and yet playfully turbulent,’ and thus makes us think about how we coexist with each other and with nature.”

Anne Lee

Drawing Desert 1983

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288

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Knotted Column, 1978

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289

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328

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COVID-19 Selfie, 2020

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