Marta Kucsora “Super Natural”

Postmasters Gallery

[Image: Marta Kucsora "Untitled 06" (2021) mixed media on linen 94.5 x 157.5 in.]

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Postmasters Gallery presents 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