Tamási Claudia: Útkereső

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An exhibition resurrected from the original WordPress archive of the Godot Gallery.

Full exhibition text

The Godot Gallery warmly invites you.

Claudia Tamási

Wayfinder

to the exhibition titled

Opening: 2010 February 9 at 20.

Opening: József Készman

Open: until March 13, from Tuesday to Friday 10 to 18, on Saturday between 10 and 13.

In 2009 Tamási – faithfully staying true to himself – entered another series. This time he assembled a labyrinth, its pieces fitting together, with the routes he had begun on them continuing by placing the sections beside, below or above one another. The artist, again, is his own subject, wandering in the labyrinth accompanied by various animals through the most varied terrain, from the bleak urban squares to the web‑like net built by a spider. Technically, the works are once again skilful; Tamási presents the paint he has scratched, painted and re‑deposited onto glass in a monotype, after which he hand‑paints miniature “Claudias” on them.

A detail from the artist's new series:

larger size, larger size, larger size

larger size larger size larger size

Some image captions:

Cars

All other things will cease

Traffic noise

Ears on the road…

Tit

The city dweller

I will wait for the text to translate.

I'm going back.

I don't know yet.

The tortoise eats my footprints…

He already knows.

Hit the mark.

Work

Kertben

You plant a tree.

Trees have heads that point downwards…

Opossum Conspiracy

Together we’re so good at it.

With the following paintings I won the Strabag Award 2008. The series consisted of self‑portraits, which were also homo‑male images.

Self‑portrait of Andy Warhol; Self‑portrait of Arnulf Rainer

Self‑portrait by Chuck Close Self‑portrait by Cindy Sherman

Earlier, with its series produced in 2007, Tamás was compared to stars.

Sophia Loren and I

Audrey Hepburn and I

Juliette Binoche and I

Uma Thurman and I

Csizmadia Alexa 2008’s essay on Claudi Tamási:

Through a mirror, hazily

According to an old joke, Móricka always thinks of the same thing about everything. Claudia Tamási does not fall into the trap of repetition, yet she is capable of consistently talking about the same thing; about the woman's place and social role, whether she is the artist herself or an allegory portrayed in the image of a child.

Self‑portrait, this repeatedly reinvented form of the past couple of centuries, offers a chance to test the limits of my own boundaries and to reflect on the individual cast into society. Experiments aimed at self‑definition appear in Claudia Tamási’s canvases at the intersection of the private sphere and social identity. Thus the series titled *Is it good now?* and *Or maybe him?* measures itself against the icons that dominate celebrity culture, gently comparing the representations seen in the media while trying to slide obediently into consumer culture. The result is a cheerful, festive society critique that draws attention to the inevitability of the media‑created female ideal and its emergence as a model, and of course to what we have known since the post‑modern period: that our personalities, or what we think of them, are shaped and determined by the place we occupy in society. Our neighbors, like countless supporting phrases, write the fiction of our identity.

According to Jacques Lacan’s mirror theory, at the early stage of development we first perceive the unity of our body by gazing into the mirror, yet we identify it with the “Other.” Later we experience a similar identification through the images of others, while our self‑image is shaped throughout a long series of subordinations. If we extend Lacan’s analogy to the pieces of the *Is that good now?* and *Or maybe she?* series, we can recognise even our own reflection in the painted portraits of famous women who masquerade in celebrity skins.

Redefining identity, just as the representation of the icons of mass culture and the so‑called elite culture within a single framework, is a postmodern feature. Cindy Sherman’s well‑known fictitious film stills (Untitled Film Stills 1977-1980) treat the stereotypes of women’s roles in film. Tamási Claudia’s satire, in terms of her approach, can be linked to her great predecessors, for they operate on a similar principle; they use the media‑mediated image of a woman as the starting point, and then largely pull the roles offered to them towards themselves. In the formation of our identity, the images broadcast by the media undoubtedly play a part, yet the media and the visualising world around us remain a patriarchal territory in which a woman’s sphere of movement is narrow; in the media a typically male‑driven fictitious idealised image of a woman appears as the object of desire in the passive roles assigned to her. In the case of Tamási Claudia’s portraits, the fact that the artist treats the subject as a woman changes the reading. Although Tamási is not listed among the artists who represent the still‑suspicious feminist discourse in Hungary, the themes she raises can rightly be counted on a similar approach from that direction.

His latest self‑portraits, dedicated to contemporary visual artists, show Tamási once again reinventing himself as an artist; this time, however, he adopts the stylistic traits of the chosen creators with a playful finger drill, picturing their visage from their own point of view. This painterly “you write yourself” offers a chance to illuminate craft knowledge, a sort of reward game, a little prattle that surprises the artist with a café corner. One can even think of József Attila when considering the result, or at least a gossiping surface. Yet this surface is not simply superficiality; it is merely the surface itself, with which Andy Warhol in an interview expressed: “If you want to know everything about me, look at the surface of my paintings, my films, and myself, and I am already standing before you. Behind all of it there is nothing.” Thus emphasis falls on the surface, and the significance of the work is limited to that. Pop Art signals a war on symbolic meanings. It zooms in only on elements culled from society and material culture, presenting them anew through magnification or repetition, but without a conceptual framework, and the artist does not bear the weight behind the images, as Barthes observed, which is revealed as a fact: the stereotype itself. Pop Art typically alters our perception; it simplifies, enlarges, highlights. In this regard, Tamási Claudia is a successor of Pop Art, most evident in her Ajkaim series. Her black‑and‑white paintings dedicated to artists take yet another twist – they regard the artists themselves as replaceable objects, reducing them to a mere mark. He does not intrude upon their work; he merely studies and treats their formal traits, their surface as a mimic, thereby lifting them into the pop spirit.

Claudia Tamási’s every painting is consistently a self‑portrait, even when she places babies or sensual flowers before the camera in place of herself (so that, by mentioning the camera as a photographic element, we can also refer to the photorealistic style). While in the series *Is It Good Now?* and *Or Perhaps She?* she hides behind the mimics of celebrities, in the same exercise that builds on new art‑historical allusions she does not simply do it as a woman, but as an artist, choosing models that are neither feminine nor purely artistic. Yet with every new painting the question grows stronger; who is Claudia Tamási, after all?

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