Kata Koleszár

Urban Paradise

7 July - 19 August, 2022

In 2008 I started to be really interested by the artist's conceptions of flora and plant ornamentation. In different stages of art history this component appears over and again with different meanings. I was doing a prospect for plants, at first I was analyzing the compositions of still life then the symbolism of gardens. Later on I focused on those textiles and drapes which are trying to represent the paradise through using plants and garden symbols. The base of my ‘Urban Paradise’ series is the well known Garden of Eden which is familiar to everyone from different cultures and religions, still I was trying to give a new perspective thinking about that. This sacrificial place such as the fine art gives a point of contact because different religions describe paradise in the same way, mostly they visualize it as a luxuriant garden. Perhaps it’s because it comes from the human being, from the evolution that we are really attached to the rich and safe greenery, we idealize it and recreate it, in this particular case we create a painting from it. Through painting it gives an opportunity to visualize contemporary ornaments, the personal beliefs and different point of view: what does paradise mean here and now? In 2009, when we were locked down because of Covid the meaning of being home changed completely and I started to seek harmony and beauty in this intimate space. We decorate our homes with different plants to make us feel we are back in paradise, in this built environment we are trying to get the illusion of an oasis and nature. I find it remarkably interesting that in the past thousand of years plants were always the part of our lives exactly in the same shape, till then we were about to deform, make some bouquet, cut them in shapes, do anything to please our expectations. Nowadays there is an increased interest in caring for plants, using them in our interior design as a decorative element, creating fabric or a wallpaper using plant patterns, we want to involve them in our home. This accelerated process inspires my oil painting, which is meant to summon the “first garden”, the paradise. I want to discover what this hardy explainable, nominal place called home looks like. I focus on creating compositions which can decorate this space but in my paintings only the plants are alive, the animals are only the patterns of the rugs and table cloths, also the human figures are appearing as porcelain figures.

Kata Koleszár

The exhibition was supported by the National Cultural Fund of Hungary.