Berhidi was already confronted with the tradition of sculpture at the College of Fine Arts. Model (1976) is a life-size terracotta nude of a bald woman, far from idealised beauty, sitting on a real thonet chair; reality and its representation meet and clash within one work. This subtle and sensual conceptual thinking accompanied her career, as did her humbleness with very different materials. Whether using stone waste, wood, metal, textiles or found objects, Berhidi’s intervention was always minimal. From recycled, reprocessed elements, she created fragile, tense balances, revealing the irregularity, unevenness and instability of the materials. Around the turn of the millennium, she created room-sized, monumental installations composed in space, and incorporated new materials considered feminine (quilts, skirts, cakes) and dead organic elements (faggot, dried roots, cactus spines) into her works. Similarly to the small bronze sculptures she had made early in her career, she reflected on family and personal events and emotions, on alienation and repression (Ben, 1997), on healing/recovery (Sewed Beam, 1999), or on death (House of Cards, 2003). The balanced, floating construction and minimalist beauty of Embroidery Frame offers several contradictory meanings; the reddish ‘pulsating’ membrane is at once threatening and threatened, erotically challenging and vulnerable (defloration), or a prisoner trapped by the ring despite the stone needle.
Kriszta Dékei