Ágnes Deli presents her latest installation, produced expressly for this exhibition. The new composition integrates organically into the oeuvre of the artist until now, as this work continues to explore the meeting, the juxtaposition of soft and hard materials. The soft is sponge covered in some sort of textile, while the hard is metal, or more precisely, iron. Five sculptures feature in the hall, one of which is a pair of mattresses, bound to the wall by two metal belts, while the others are freestanding in the space. The seven photographs on the wall, depicting natural details and factures taken from nature, relate to these.
What is new in comparison with the artist’s works until now is the fact that she employs flesh-coloured imitation leather rather than simple fabric. Furthermore, this strange colour and the red marble of the floor of the project room mutually reinforce each other. One of the sculptures standing in the space also returns the gesture in its red-copper element. The further three sculptures standing in the space are sponge mattresses slid and driven into metal columns of approximately one and a half metres high. The first mattress follows the rectangular form of the metal base, while the other two have a rounded, organic form: the first is heart-shaped, and the other recalls the cap of a gnome.
The freestanding sculptures – or, as the artist refers to them: the bodies – evoke trees. Body-coloured, soft imitation leather boughs on metal trunks. The form of the tree, the colour of flesh, the softness evoke nature, while the processing of the metal, the clean, angular forms, smooth surfaces and the plastic nature of the sponge and the imitation leather recall the artificial. We see natural details on the wall in an artificial form (photographs), while the bodies are completely synthetic, and nevertheless assume natural form.
There is no tension between the natural and the artificial, the hard and the soft, the heavy and the light. These appear not as extreme opposites, but as a complementary unit of Yin and Yang, as a harmonic whole.
