MARTA KUCSORA
Super Natural
March 13 - May 1, 2021
Postmasters Gallery is extremely pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Hungarian artist Marta Kucsora.
"Super Natural" will be Kucsora's first exhibition in New York and in the US. Presenting ten monumental works in both
galleries, we introduce an artist at the peak of her unique, experimental, non figurative practice who is aware of the rich
lineage of abstraction as she moves that very language forward into 2021.
Resonating across time with Pollock's action, Frankenthaler's fluidity, 1980's Richter's abstract spatiality, and
contemporary gestural abstraction's referentiality, Kucsora's update of brushless action paintings invariably reflects
the performative process of their making. With a Polke-like penchant for experimentation, Kucsora expands her
materialist repertoire of painterly media in her chemical "kitchen." And then she deploys her concoctions on a fearless
scale. Her vision- filling paintings are at once spatially deep and canvas-flat, and they vibrate with the energy of embodied
paradox: of control alongside chance operation, of rhythm and order amidst chaos. They offer the techno-feel of
otherworldly-some would say interstellar--presence on a scale that entices viewers to project themselves into their
pictorial fields with alluring abandon.
In a newly published monograph on Kucsora, Marton Orosz, Director of Vasarely Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in
Budapest writes:
"Kucsora's works communicate a miniature metaphysical event, born of the tension of matter that is frozen in time and
then liquefied in turn. They seem to be continuously rewriting themselves, evoking the surrealist technique of
decalcomania, écriture automatique or the chemigrams that became popular in the 1950s in the field of subjectless
photography. Reminiscent of thickening mulberry jam, colour pigments crystallize in certain spots into geological
structures, or turn into lava flows, bearing the signs of physical processes that come into being via deliberate or
random dialectic, as a result of a peculiar "trial and error" methodology. We find ourselves in an experimental lab,
a kitchen with chemical concoctions. Kucsora is cooking up a secret recipe, mixing up paints of varied density and
viscosity, painting mediums, pastes, lacquers and gelatins, spraying, sprinkling these more or less diluted materials
onto the completely dry or moistened canvas. Her choice depends on whether she wants the final product to bear the
marks of the operation of physical laws on surface tension, or instead, the depiction of the dominance of centripetal
or centrifugal forces".
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Part homage, part sisterhood, Marta Kucsora's instagram feed (@martakucsora) often pairs her work with words of
female artists that came before. Female artists that, like her, averted gender categorization in order to claim an equal
playing field.
"An image never betrays you; if you look hard enough you will make order out of disorder."
Louise Bourgeois
"You aren't rigid with some fixed idea before you go into your studio of what a painting should be... because it seems
to take all the joy out of living."
Lee Krasner
'I think that since the Abstract Expressionists, painting is in the same category as music. It really is abstract.'
Agnes Martin
"I was never conscious of being a female artist and I resent being called a 'woman artist' - I'm an artist. Actually,
I don't even like being called an artist anymore - I'm a painter."
Grace Hartigan
"One thing Pollock said that was very good was, 'I am nature.' That was not actually a macho statement,
because everyone is nature too. What else could we possibly be? Leonardo da Vinci was nature. Da Vinci
understood the movement of water. [...] He understood from his own blood flow the flow of water. He understood,
from the music in his veins, the flow of water. And that's objective abstraction."
Pat Steir