ARTIST PROFILE

Eszter Kinga Deli

  • Hungary (b. 1977 in Budapest)
  • Currently in Brussels, Belgium.
  • In her works, Eszter Kinga DELI focuses on vulnerability as a necessary state for openness. She is creating images which hold the tension of a possible metamorphosis.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Since the relatively young age of 12, when I decided to deal with image making, more specifically with painting, I am very much interested in how things can refer to other things, namely how something is becoming a symbol. I like to use common place, kitsch images when I am dealing with this in my works, like rose and lion in my current Bed of Roses series.

I am also interested how marks of past events; conflicts and traumas can be represented from the point of vulnerability. Here the symbols help to catch the tension of possible metamorphoses which are also inherent in traumas. One of my main subject matter is childhood (Domesticating, Traps of Childhood series).
In the Mme Récamier Project I made the paraphrase of Jacque-Louis David's famous painting  with young women living in a housing for single mothers.

Closely related to past events I am dealing with the representations of time. How layers of memories and physical things are build on each other to create a constantly changing present. In the Missing Mirrors series the motion which draws the reflection on the mirror’s surface also simultaneously removes it: both represents and covers it. It is a similar how memories are fixed. The memory covers, substitutes the event, object, person on which it is based. As it is being build it also simplifies, summarizes, compacts. Prepares a new place for reception.

Connecting to the above mentioned, Rona Kopeczky, art historian and curator formulates about my Landing series:

"The starting point of the series Landing (2013-2014) is a found picture, the reproduction of an etching entitled The Age of Nero, originating from a world history book. The artist’s first intention was to cut out some of the figures in order to create new micro stories, but she gradually used all the elements cut out from the original picture in different compositions. The title of the series, Landing, is directly referring to the content of the original image itself, but is also strongly connoted and automatically questions our associative reflexes; What is the link between the WWII historical event and this work? Or is there any connection at all? Through this playful question resembling a riddle, Eszter multiplies the layers of interpretation, explores and subtly sheds light on how the process, the mechanisms of constructing stories and are fed by collective emotions and unconscious archetypes. In other words, beyond the simply formal and physical transformation or metamorphosis of a picture resulting from the attribution of new borders and therefore a new context to it, the artist destabilizes our formatted reflexes and associative automatisms and draws in our minds a psychological and cultural imaginary map of storytelling."  

http://blog.works.io/featured-artists-august-2014/#more-189



BIOGRAPHY

Eszter Kinga DELI was graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where she specialized in painting. She participated in the TIPP - Tihany International Postgraduate Program, organized by Goldsmith College London and Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. She spent two month in Rome with the Hungarian Academy Scholarship.

She is exhibiting regularly since 2000, her most recent solo show was in the independent complex cultural space of MÜSZI. 
She had exhibitions in Budapest, Vienna and Rome.