Köves, Éva: Budapest-Venice (Clouds) (1997)

In her works Éva Köves uses her own photographs, repainting them. The photographs in this work were taken when she accepted Katalin Néray’s invitation to be one of the exhibitors at the Hungarian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and travelled by car from Budapest to Venice to visit the site of the future exhibition. In most of her works, Köves used shots of urban ‘landscapes’, buildings, construction scaffolding and safety nets. The motorway, although also a man-made object, runs outside the city, so the artist’s attention was naturally drawn to the landscape, especially the sky, since light, the contrast between dark and light, had always been a fundamental element of her art. Venice and the clouds, as the title suggests, inevitably evoke the great tradition of Venetian painting, the treatment of light (Titian, Tintoretto) or the Venetian Rococo cloud paintings (Tiepolo). The work is both a personal travelogue and a tribute to her predecessors and to Venice. The work was exhibited in the Hungarian Pavilion of the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997.