At the beginning of the new millennium hopeful artistic movements started in the city of Kecskemét. Of course, there had been some movements earlier: let’s think about the almost 3-decade operation of the International Ceramics Studio, the work of the animation film studio, the renovated Gallery of Kecskemét and its nation-wide exhibitions, or the creative house, where in addition to the painters and graphic artists creating in a common system there are textile artists, returning to the symposiums of Kecskemét as regular guests.
The new artistic movements can be seen in the field of sculptural art: in 2003 and 2004, in the courtyard of the City Hall there was an invitational exhibition called “Free Space”, presenting the works of the outstanding artists of the contemporary Hungarian sculptural art, at which the organizers showed works of art larger than the size of small plastics and exhibition-hall plastics, but smaller than monumental public-space sculptures, not linked to any environment and prepared independent of orders.
Such headway of sculptural art in Kecskemét might entail the 1st Symposium on Steel Sculptural Art of Kecskemét, being organized in the summer of 2004, at which – as a result of the support of KÉSZ Kft. of Kecskemét housing the symposium – six artists were able to prepare their latest works of art. Strangely enough it all happened when the Hungarian creative colonies lived their critical period, and such crisis hit the sculptural colonies the most: the stone sculptural colony of Siklós had been closed a long time ago, the steel sculptural colony of Dunaújváros had suspended its operation, the wood sculptural workshop of Nagyatád had been vegetating, and only the artists’ colony of Nyíregyháza-Sóstó, Tatabánya and Zalaegerszeg had worked continuously, with the same intensity.
The almost 40-year history of the Hungarian sculptural artists’ colonies has created an important chapter in Hungarian art, and it is especially true for the sculptural organizations working occasionally in certain periods of the year. In the decades before the change of the regime it was the creative sphere, where the artists could work relatively independently, actually free, keeping off the “blessings” of the art policy giving guidance or supporting-prohibiting-tolerating. And it was the sculptural sphere, in which large-sized works of art requiring large material supplies and technical apparatus could be born so that there was no orderer and no contradictious jury – or if there was, only afterwards and completely unnecessarily. The sculptors working in teams were free to experiment in workshops integrated by material types or technical procedures, so these creative colonies played a very important role in the elaboration of the new endeavours of modern Hungarian sculptural art, the expansion of material usage, the technical renewal and the revival of progressive initiatives.
In Hungary of the years of 2000, of course, the situation is totally different from that before the 90’s, but the conditions of sculptural art have remained unchanged: basic material, industrial-type technical apparatus, workshop conditions and the support of work possibilities are necessary. In Kecskemét – like earlier at the artists’ colony of Dunaújváros, the operation of which has been suspended recently – metal-working and steel-processing have become the field of sculptural work, which material and elaboration method dictated by such material have inspired the creation of compositions of a character different from the sculptures made with the traditional casting procedure. Instead of moulding the composition is made by construction, engineering, cutting, joining and fusing. Iron and steel are materials having completely different physical characteristics, behaving totally differently, than bronze, the traditional material of sculptural art, and this exhibition can evidence, how versatile they are with opportunities to create various works of art.
The six participants of the 1st Symposium on Steel Sculptural Art of Kecskemét are artists belonging to the middle generation of contemporary Hungarian sculptural art, but beyond generation coherence we can find little similarities in their works: the only integrating factor may be that all of them are experimenting artists looking for new possibilities of expression, rejecting academic, conventional solutions, who have already established the distinct, characteristic physiognomy of their sculptural world, and whose works can be grasped by characteristic features. Such spirituality, such features are reflected by the works created in Kecskemét in 2004.
