Double Q Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation by Gizella Rákóczy at Art Central Hong Kong 2022, revealing the rigour of the late artist’s practice as one of the foremost representatives of Hungarian and international geometric art. In the late 1970s, Rákóczy became captivated by the four-armed spiral and its numerical laws in connection with an ancient Scottish diagram. This developed into a lifelong fascination with the world of spirals, which she studied for decades via painting until her unexpected death in 2015. The selection of 7 works crystallises the essence of the late artist’s oeuvre spanning three decades, ranging from tempera and silkscreen printing to her masterful handling of watercolour on paper.
Like mathematical sequences, Rákóczy’s artworks display seemingly random but regular patterns. Using the four-armed spiral as a starting point, she established a system through combinatorics that she rendered into the language of painting. She began to create colour tempera paintings in 1980, which brought to life complex systems in an image format. It was during this time that System I–XV (1982) was produced, illustrating the possible permutations of 6 quadricolour (yellow, red, green, blue) spiral nuclei on a single image surface. Through reduplication, multiplication, rotation, and mirroring, Rákóczy created endless series based off a single shape: the spiral.
From 1998, her tempera paintings of the numerical laws of four-armed spirals were replaced by a new use of material and principle of mathematics: Rákóczy started to layer her tones of watercolour according to the mathematical formula of Fibonacci’s linear recursive sequence. This laid the foundation for the creation of 4 Colour 4 Tones (2002), and eventually 256N (2009) which can be regarded as the most radical work of Rákóczy’s oeuvre, as well as the ultimate evolution of her aquarelle series. The delicately pale, transparent, monochrome surface created from superimposed tonal gradations not only lend these works to an outcome of speculative knowledge exuding the charm of rational aesthetics, but also testifies to the analytical and minutely detailed character of her practice.
Parallel to her aquarelle series Rákóczy explored another theme: the cycle of the year. Almost every thread of her theoretical research and system theory comes together in the work Cretan Labyrinth = Cycle of the Year (2005) which was created during the final stages of her lifetime and artistic career. The labyrinth, which has been a mythical geometric form for millennia, has been a well-known referential symbol throughout the history of humanity. In addition to its strong connotations to Greek mythology, the images can be regarded as a summation of her previous explorations of painting-related and mathematical problematics. The square where the spiral arms meet (the nucleus), whose quarters were previously filled in with four colours or different tones of the same colour, now signify the starting and/or end point of the form as a “vacant” quadrate field.
Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1947, Gizella Rákóczy lived and worked there until her unexpected death in 2015. Her works have been acquired by numerous private and institutional collections across Europe, including Hungarian National Gallery, Rómer Flóris Museum, Collegium Hungaricum, Arithmeum and the Ludwig Museum.
- Mónika Zsikla
