Celebrating Print Magazine

Another artist exploring traditional techniques in a contemporary condition is Kamilla Szij (b. 1957), who began her artistic career in the mid-1980s. She applies the basic element of intaglio printmaking—a line incised into the plate—to produce compositions through the mechanic rotation of the engraved matrix or sheets of paper during the printing process. Szij’s installations of prints are also characterized by a postminimalist expression. Her individual images with different combinations of lines are organized into continuous series, aligned as large-scale pictures of interrelating elements. The lines, their shape, thickness and size, carry no inherent significance, but when one looks at the composite whole, there appears an essential form, evoking the throb of life as a multitude of accidental and predestined moments. The artist’s drypoints are based on the repetition and perpetual superposition of identical movements and the minimal difference that entails.

Julia Meszaros, Defied Traditions and Technological Trends, The Chronology of Hungarian Printmaking, in Celebrating Print Volume 2 Number 2. This issue is available in print and digital at www.celebratingprint.com.

“The complex links between the work, the artist and the environment have been subject to continuous research by Hungarian artist Dora Maurer (b.1937). After she completed an experimental period of creating surnaturalistic (see note below) compositions, Maurer exploited drypoint to explore simple geometric forms. She analyzed relationship between the plate and the traces it left on paper, as well as the act of multiplication and printmaking as a process of forming imagery. She examined the direct and indirect possibilities of leaving marks, the physical changes of the plate, the temporality of the printing process and the changes of the printed form ((de)formation series, 1974, Hidden Structures, 1979). In her last systematic series, Printing Till Exhaustion (1979), she documented the mechanical repetition of printmaking until the expiration of the plate. 

Maurer’s conceptual work sheds light on the fact that a print is not a static pictorial form, but part of artistic activity, in which the image’s existential state depends on the environment, along with its invention, creation, appearance and interpretation....”

Note: Sandor Hornyik, “Aesthetics in the shadow of politics: Surnaturalism and magical socialist realism in Hungary in the early Sixties,” Acta Historiae Artium 56, no. 1 (2015): 323-332.

Julia Meszaros, Defied Traditions and Technological Trends, The Chronology of Hungarian Printmaking, in Celebrating Print Volume 2 Number 2. This issue is available in print and digital at www.celebratingprint.com. To support our mission, please consider subscribing. 

Images above: Dora Maurer, Traces of a Circle 1-4, 1974, drypoint on paper, 35 x 50 cm image size, 50 x 70 cm paper size, edition of 10, photograph by Miklos Sulyok, collection of the artist (Budapest).

Image below: Dora Maurer, Printing till Exhaustion I, 1979, drypoint on paper, canvas, 100 x 70 cm (two pieces), edition of 4, photograph by the artist, collection of the artist (Budapest).