Artist: Adrian Kiss
Exhibition title: Satin, Soil, Stomach
Curated by: Lilla Lipusz
Venue: VUNU Gallery, Kosice, Slovakia
Date: June 28 – August 30, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of VUNU Gallery, Kosice
The solo show Satin, Soil, Stomach by Hungarian-Romanian artist Adrian Kiss presents, alongside recent works, the artist’s new textile-based objects and metal installations that were created specifically for this exhibition at VUNU Gallery.
Kiss is one of the best-known names of his generation in Hungary, who has gained recognition for his inventive textile sculptures and installations that revolve around the human body and the hybrid, postnatural age we live in. Over the past ten years, he has developed a distinctive visual language that combines organic materials (leather, wood, etc.) and ancient techniques such as pottery with manufactured fabrics and industrial aesthetics to give a new, visceral form to subjective experience. Kiss is the only artist living and working in Budapest who has been included in Phaidon’s acclaimed survey of contemporary textile artists, Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art.
Satin, Soil, Stomach marks a new chapter in the artist’s practice. Partially breaking with the meticulous design process that has characterized his working method to date, Kiss now incorporates found household objects, second-hand personal items, and fabric scraps into his works to create a narrative scene that fills the entire exhibition space. The large-scale installation transforms the concrete underground space of the former swimming pool into a constructed, parallel reality where different sets of contrasting qualities (e.g., handcrafted and manufactured, feminine and masculine, past and future, natural and industrial) meet in an organic way.
Two black leather sculptures from the artist’s latest Dunyha (Eiderdown) series serve as an entry point to the exhibition. These black holes, evoking enlarged body orifices or hollow body parts, seem to foreshadow the kind of fragmented body image that is manifested in the new works. In the case of the small iron structures, for example, in the central part of the space, one can discover biker jacket parts among the various leftover materials (pieces of plastic and cotton dust sheets, sponge, leather scraps, etc.) that are wrapped around the metal tubes. References to the human body are also present in the two textile sculptures on view in the remote corners of the gallery. These soft torsos, however, made up of used satin quilts and feather pillows, are not representing life—they are lying on the floor like long-lost corpses. The central piece of the show is Stomach, a monumental installation in which an enormous egg-shaped woven basket penetrates a curtain-like piece of tarpaulin and a black quilted leather panel featuring a car-like motif. By positioning the basket opening at eye level, the artist forces the viewers to look into the huge black hole and face the content of the gigantic “stomach”.
Through the inclusion of commonplace objects and decomposing materials that bear evidence of past use and that draw from the artist’s childhood memories of living in the Romanian countryside, the exhibition Satin, Soil, Stomach becomes a place of encounter between bygone times and the hyperindustrial present, offering a meditation on the impermanent, transitory nature of existence.
The exhibition is realized as the winning project of VUNU’s international Open Call from 2022.
Budapest-based artist Adrian Kiss (b. 1990, Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, including at the Center for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague, Make Up Gallery in Košice, as well as Trafó Gallery, acb Gallery and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. He has also been included in group exhibitions at such institutions as CAN Centre d’art in Neuchâtel (CH), Künstlerhaus – Halle für Kunst&Medien in Graz (AT), Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (HR), and the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest (HU). His most recent group exhibitions include Crucible (2022) at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York (US), Intertwining Textures (2023) at Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (DE), and Responsive Matter (2023) organized by Fundația Triade as part of Timișoara European Capital of Culture 2023 (RO).
