ARTIST PROFILE

Kitti Gosztola

  • Hungary (b. 1986 in Székesfehérvár)
  • Currently in Budapest, Hungary.

REPRESENTATION

 DEPTHS OF EXTRACTION

DEPTHS OF EXTRACTION

  • 2017
  • cast steel
  • 50 x 70 x 35 cm
  •  - thumbnail ALL THAT IS RARE, EXOTIC AND PORTENTIOUS CONTAINED IN THE FECUND WOMB OF NATURE  - thumbnail detail - thumbnail detail - thumbnail  - thumbnail  DEPTHS OF EXTRACTION - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail

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    Rock Solid Casting | 2017

Rock Solid Casting consists of three pieces created in the recently revived Dunaújváros Steel Sculptor Workshop, which from the early ’70s introduced contemporary and abstract art to this Communist model town founded in 1951 as Stalin Town. Each piece of the series is related to a thinker’s interest in mining and the visual conventions of the age.------------- ALL THAT IS RARE, EXOTIC AND PORTENTIOUS CONTAINED IN THE FECUND WOMB OF NATURE (2017)------------------------------------------------------------------------- This sculpture is based on an etching published in Athanasius Kircher’s 1665 encyclopedia, Mundus Subterraneus, depicting the process of magmatic ore formation. Kircher’s observations are embedded into a speculative worldview which conceives the underground world, together with the entire universe, as a glorious theophany waiting only for mankind to discover its benefits.------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DEPTHS OF EXTRACTION (2017)----------------------------------------------------------------- Depths of Extraction is inspired by images depicting underground mining techniques, published in Principles of Mining (1909) by Herbert C. Hoover when the future US president was working as an independent consultant in gold and ore mines around the world. In the drawings, there is a striking contrast between the seemingly organic, amoebic seams and the human-made geometric grid of access. Depths of Extraction recreates such a structure in three dimensions, as if the whole system was a mould into which the very material is now cast back. It can also be related to the concept of Bioromanticism (Bioromantik), a kind of biocentric constructivism theorized by ex-Bauhaus ideologist Ernst Kállai, characteristic of Max Bill or the late Moholy-Nagy. -------- MOTHER EARTH (2017)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Most woodcuts related to mining depict truncated trees around the mineshafts. Mining in the Middle Ages was unimaginable without wood. Beams were used in the shafts and charcoal was needed for ore processing. Thus, miners were usually let to use the sorrounding forests as they wished. The deforestation and the shortage of wood eventually procreated forest management. Although the principles of modern environmental protection came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the issue of preserving the environment has been present throughout history. As Georgius Agricola recalls in De re metallica (1556) – translated to English by Herbert Hoover and LourHenry Hoover – in Italy, it was once forbidden by law to ravage the Earth and destroy fertile lands for the sake of ore. Mining was seen as a wicked activity in the antiquity. Philosophers argued that the Earth does not conceal the goods that are useful for mankind, while the unessential minerals had been expelled to the bowels of the Earth for a reason. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses where the Four Ages of Man (Golden, Silver, Bronze, Iron) are described, bringing the ores up to the surface in the Iron Age counts as a lethal sin of mankind. “And not only was the rich soil required to furnish corn and due sustenance, but men even descended into entrails of the earth, and they dug up riches, those incentives to vice, which the earh had hidden and had removed to the Stygian shades.” Mother Earth combines this citation with Dante’s Inferno, interpreted as the downward shrinking cones of gold and silver mines.