Zoltán Kemény and Madeleine Kemény-Szemere. Dual Horizon. Works in the Collection of International Art after 1800

Zoltán Kemény (1907–1965) and Madeleine Kemény-Szemere (1906–1993) met in Paris in 1930, where, pausing their careers as painters, they worked as fashion illustrators. During World War II, they fled to Switzerland because of their Jewish origin and resumed painting there. Zoltán Kemény earned international acclaim with his metal reliefs, which he had started making in the 1950s, while Madeleine Kemény-Szemere gave up her art career in 1956 to support her husband’s. Their lives followed a path lined with decisions between their careers as artists and private individuals and unfolded along the different opportunities defined by their male and female positions, while including dualities such as material and immaterial, archaic and modern, tradition and its rejection, and the relationship between part and whole. The exhibition simultaneously features their shared inspirations – their interest in tribal art, children’s drawings and unorthodox materials – and their autonomous characters. Visitors can discover Kemény-Szemere’s social sensitivity conveyed by her sketchy figures and witness her focus on the female role, and they can also explore Zoltán Kemény’s oeuvre spanning from his early paintings with an ironic tone to his metal reliefs evoking the structures of the micro- and macrocosms.

The robust characters of Madeleine Kemény-Szemere’s paintings evoke the world of children’s drawings and the anatomy of archaic “naïve” figures. The women featured in her pictures are isolated as they are immersed in their work and virtually become one with their confined environment. Jean Dubuffet, who built modes of expression outside the scope of classical art, including graffiti and tribal art, into his works, exerted a significant influence on her art. The two artists also met in person in 1946. Two of Kemény-Szemere’s works, included in her donation to the museum in 1984, will debut at this exhibition.

The current selection contains works from every period in Zoltán Kemény’s oeuvre. In his pictures painted in the 1940s, he reflected upon the art history tradition and the tools of traditional visual representation with humour, but at times he also expressed social criticism, albeit subtly. From 1947, he began using new materials in his works with their basic ingredient being the easily workable material called pavatex (insulation material used in the building industry), onto which he applied sand or plaster, for example. His relief collages are characterised by dense earth tones and textures reminiscent of cave paintings. The material quality of his works and the simplified forms of tribal art and children’s drawings brought him into contact with the COBRA group, and he participated in their Amsterdam debut in 1949 together with his wife, whose art followed a similar vein. From 1953, he exclusively worked with metal: he initially used prefabricated industrial parts in his new abstract compositions to create dynamic and pulsating reliefs igniting space into motion. His works open a wide array of associations ranging from microscopic photographs to images made of the stellar system.

The curator of the exhibition is art historian Dominika Sodics.