- Dates
- 8 June 2023 – 24 June 2023
- Venue
- Godot Galéria · 1114 Budapest, Bartók Béla út 11–13.
- Press contact
- [email protected]
Short listing
Dobó Bianka: Col tempo
Full exhibition text
Dobó Bianka: Col tempo
Godot Gallery
2023. 06. 08 – 24.
Tuesday–Friday 10:00 – 14:00
Saturday 10:00 – 13:00
Opening
2023 . 06 . 07 . 18:00
Open
Virág Ágnes, art historian
The exhibition is titled after Giorgione’s famous Venetian old‑woman portrait, La Vecchia, specifically the inscription it bears, which warns of the passing time (Col tempo – with time). At the show she organised as the winner of the 2021 Godot Art Fair, Dobó Bianka expanded and further developed the series of frottages she had made of the stone carvings on the tombstones found on the floor of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli during her 2018 Roman scholarship period. The complementary engraving on the impressions marks the damage, repairs and replacements of the tombstones, serving as a sort of symbolic artistic reconstruction that recalls details already slipping into obscurity. Over time the footprints of the faithful and other visitors have worn away the rich decoration and inscriptions of the tombstones so far that their original appearance can only be traced. The inscriptions and carvings on the stones gradually disappear entirely through the erosion of steps, and the memory of the people depicted on them fades as time passes.
During the multi‑hour, physically demanding process of frottage, the artist rubs a block of graffiti over a canvas to imprint the pattern of tombstones. In the act of making the impression, the artist captures a fragment of passing time. By transferring the sculptures into another medium, the artist preserves the representations, thereby also protecting the memories of the deceased from disappearance. Even though forgetting is a natural conclusion of the process of remembrance, preserving mementos remains a pure, humane act.
Bianka Dobó is currently a lecturer and PhD student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She previously won the Vásárhelyi Őszi Tárlat Young Painters Award, the Grand Prize of the International Drawing and Graphic Design Biennale, the award of the Hungarian Association of Graphic Artists, the award of the MKE Graphic Department at the International Small Graphic Biennale, and she was shortlisted for significant national and international prizes such as the Eszterházy Art Award and the Strabag Art Award.