Imre, Mariann: Heart (2000)

Imre graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1991, and even her early works were characterised by minimalism, reductive form and the study of facture, and the visual representation of absence. Her first embroidered concrete works (Anatomical Experiment, 1996) and installations (Saint Cecilia, 1997) were made from the middle of the decade. In 1999 she was awarded a scholarship from the Hungarian Academy in Rome. The work in our collection, consisting of 53 concrete hearts, was made there; the artist made a heart every day during the period of the scholarship, almost like a diary. The work was inspired by a group of objects seen in Roman churches, the votive hearts. Created by combining the red vascularity of the heart with solid grey concrete, it merges vulnerability and unbreakable solidity, a sense of home living and pulsating in a strange material, while also juxtaposing opposites such as living/inanimate, cold/hot, inside/outside, masculine/feminine, profane/spiritual. This work symbolically foreshadowed her series (“Recording the Ephemeral”), which began around 2010 and is expanding in time and subject matter, in which, alongside the embroidered heart that appears as a Christmas ornament, there are elusive, ephemeral phenomena, everyday and sacral “fragments” that emerge from the accumulation of moments, such as the traces of the stream’s current on the stones of the riverbed, pollen on a table, pine needles scattered under the Christmas tree.

Kriszta Dékei