Artist: Márta Kucsora

review by Sandrine Welte read more...

Patricia Low presents an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Hungarian artist Márta Kucsora. Less Orderly Ways marks the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at Patricia Low Venezia.

United by their particular hue, or light palette, the 12 works on view date from 2021 to 2024. Forms reminiscent of twisting vines, cellular matrices, and lava-like formations in greens, blues, pinks and gold occupy the canvases, each one alive with a sense of movement. Kucsora's richly layered abstractions, with their various splashes, flourishes, and calligraphic lines, invite active contemplation from the viewer and speak to the abundantly ornamented identity of Venice itself.

A continuation of Kucsora's investigation into living processes, the works on show are all created by means of a fluid experimentation with water-based, organic chemicals poured on large-scale linen canvases in an afternoon's brushless, choreographed performance. The results of this finely calibrated, yet also adventitious, dance of pigments, activators and retarders, are surfaces composed of layers of thin paint whose forms variously evoke biological structures or cosmological phenomena. A collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious, between the premeditated and the un-calculated, Kucsora's liquid ecologies constitute a kind of alchemy mediated by the relationship between artist and material.

Born in Szeged, Hungary, in 1979, Márta Kucsora was educated at Montclair State University, New Jersey and at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, where she now lives and works. She has exhibited at home and internationally since 2007, including solo shows at the Kunsthalle Budapest and Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts, Budapest; Postmasters Gallery, New York; and The Concept Space, London. Recent solo exhibitions include Liminal Spaces at Kahan Art Space Buda, Éva Kahan Foundation, Budapest, and Liquid Obsession, at Bunker West, Berlin and Never step into the same river twice at CoBra Gallery Shanghai. Her works feature in the collections of the Hungarian National Bank, Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, 21C Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, and Sammlung Lupa, among others.