According to the philosopher Lajos Szabó, "reality is given in perspectives." With Maszó, there is no single perspective, only a multiplicity of perspectives, a series of perspectives that offer insight into the complexity of reality, the richness of the world. And understanding requires shifts, changes of perspective and different experiences that reveal differences. The exhibition at The Space offers the viewer an opportunity to reflect on the role of shifting perspectives in art; three artists from different generations, each with a very different relationship to the textile tradition, present in this exhibition a particular, non-genre-specific abstraction, or rather a condensed cosmological perspective, offering evidence that an artistic phenomenon is of higher quality the greater the tension between its openness and its self-containedness.

Gabriella Hajnal (1928) An outstanding figure in Hungarian tapestry art, he graduated as a painter from the College of Fine Arts in 1957 and immediately switched to tapestry making: "I enjoyed being able to work within the strict constraints of vertical weaving and horizontal weaving, and finding the best way to express my ideas within these limits," writes Hajnal, whose fundamental experience was encountering the tapestry series Lady with a Unicorn at the Cluny Museum in Paris. Hajnal progressed decade by decade on his path of individual abstraction; his early tapestries were still fairy-tale-like, then inspired by ancient historical periods, until the 1970s, when she arrived at a minimalist motif world and a clean-structured tapestry concept, in which the centuries-old tradition of tapestry weaving could also become a field for experimentation. The three-part embroidered felt wool work entitled Balance (1979) featured in the exhibition is a testament to Hajnal's experimental approach. The concise composition, reduced to a symbolically dense motif by a line dividing the circle in two, and the color scheme limited to a few restrained shades, testify to an abstraction that is almost unique in Hajnal's oeuvre. A view from a changed perspective.

Eszter Kass (1959) followed the opposite path to her mother, Gabriella Hajnal. Eszter Kass graduated from the Department of Textiles at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts in 1984, but it was the state of textile art in Hungary in the 1980s that made her feel like a failure, so she turned to painting. The abstraction of his works is always derived from nature. Enlarged details of organic forms and structures emerge, painted in strong radiant colours. But his series of paintings from 1999 play on the ambivalence that links textile art and fine art in the second half of the 20th century. After all, many contemporary artists consciously evoke and quote textiles in their canvases, and the exciting factorial and symbolic possibilities of different materials, fabrics and weaves have long since infiltrated the painters' motif library. In Eszter Kass's brilliantly coloured works, it is as if pseudo-pachworks, as if the seams of quilting, the needlework, the meeting of different qualities of materials were the main theme of her oil paintings.

Eszter Poroszlai (1974) is the youngest member of the trio and has gone furthest in freely and conceptually reinterpreting the textile genre. Throughout his career, Poroszlai has explored the possibilities of redefining space and the relativity of perspective, using a minimalist but constantly experimental artistic toolkit. His latest experiments lead into the world of unique photographs and prints, exploring combinatorial variations based on the displacement of transparency and form. His series Insta(nt)llation, which has been growing since 2021, uses the oldest photographic process, cyanotype, in which images are created with the help of sunlight. The precise geometry of the spherical shape projected onto the canvas contrasts with the painterly quality of the analog process. Poroszlai has been using thread embroidery as a structuring element in her photographs and prints for years. In this series, the cyan blue color of the background, symbolizing the cosmos, enters into an exciting dialogue with the interference of the neon pink thread system that reveals the internal laws of the sphere. The Layers series explores the possibilities of color and form combinations created during displacement. The transparency of the colored (blue, yellow, and magenta) squares—with a circular hole in the center indicating the axis of rotation—always results in a different, dynamically changing image. Poroszlai's complex artistic exploration harmonizes best with Lajos Szabó's words quoted above: "Reality is given in perspectives."

Noémi Szabó art historian, curator