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KATA LEGRADY
February
3 – March 12, 2011
Opening
reception Thursday, February 3, 5-8pm
The
artist & David Rosenberg will be in
attendance.
Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to
present a solo exhibition of photographs and sculptures by
German -based artist Kata
Legrady.
Kata
Legrady proceeds by collision, arousing a sculptural
confrontation and symbolic encounter of two different worlds.
On the one hand weapons of war and sweets on the other. In
other words, a short circuit between lethal and harmless, a
tension between childhood and destruction, between freedom
from care and suffering. The choice of Smarties, a colorful
sugar-coated chocolate confectionery, evokes the “colored
dots” with which Roy Lichtenstein painted his large-format
comic strips. The difference is, however, that the
confectionary here does not serve to create representational
images, but covering them with abstract ornamental motive that
do not make them unrecognizable or unusable. In the hands of
the artist, machine guns, grenades, handguns become strange
and glossy, almost beautiful and attractive.
The
object obtained in this way can be shown as it is. It is
exhibited presented under bell jar or glass as a curiosity or
a powerful talisman, or it can be photographed. The scale can
be changed in this way, enlarging the object to a great
extent. It always appears frontally to the viewer, illuminated
by an inflexible light, contrasted by an immaculate white
background. This other way of creating distance only heightens
the dumb and hypnotic presence of the transformed object; as
if a precious hallucination. Images dominated by clinically
precise, hauntingly vibrating colors; pictures, as the artist
put it, of children-soldiers and other
abominations.
Kata Legrady was born in 1974 in
Barcs, Hungary, currently lives in Hanover (Germany) and works
in Hanover (Germany), Budapest (Hungary) and Paris (France).
Legrady’s exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery will be
accompanied by a new book on her work titled “Bombs and
Candies” by David Rosenberg, published by Skira Publishing
House in Milan, Italy. The book is distributed in North
America by Rizzoli International Publication. “Art Game Book,
Artists in the 20th Century” (Assouline Publishing, New York,
2010) is another book by David Rosenberg which will also
accompany Legrady’s exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery, the
book included Legrady’s work together with the works of
artists: Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Vanessa
Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan and more.
Image:
Kata Legrady
Gas
mask 1, 2009
c print,
mounted on alu-dibond with plexiglas
49 x 68
½ in
Courtesy
of Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto
Pari Nadimi Gallery
254
Niagara Street
Toronto,
ON
Canada,
M6J 2L8
+1 (416)
591-6464
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