Kovács, Lola: The First Moment (2003)

The painting The First Moment by Lola Kovács, a liberal arts graduate and painter, represents the painting approach and creative practice of her career in the early 2000s. It is characterised by the close-up representation of a human face, eye or body part on canvas. In 2004, shortly before the painting entered the collection, Kovács won the Strabag Painting Prize for her work, which was accompanied by an exhibition of the prize-winners’ works in the Ludwig Museum. This exhibition included a painting of a highly magnified female eye, in which the artist also used a blow-up effect to extract and resize detail. The intense, exaggerated painting style recalls the brushwork of the earlier New Sensibility, while the colour palette used, with its blues, reds and yellows, also characterises Kovács’s colouring. It is easy to see how the totalisation of a single detail (the eyes) in the painting cancels out the uniqueness of the gaze, which is perceived as a personality trait (“The eyes are the mirror of the soul”). Although in her paintings it is not the specific persons who serve as models that are important, the artist’s practice draws attention to the environment of the gaze that creates the image, to the specificity of the representation and with it the relativity of our cultural claims.

József Készman