Enchanted Forest
The Magic Forest is a site-specific installation of the Sziget Festival. Katalin and Paul Kortmann were invited by the Gross Arnold Gallery to design and build an installation for the Artgarden site, a bench covered with symbolic flowers and concrete heads, a small island of retreat, exit and rest, also ideal for a selfie point, where the human face becomes part of the installation in a fixed position. The bench is set in a small grove with a curious mirror frame, a paraphrase of one of Gross's paintings, which is also a fairground stunt device, and the strange reflective ornaments covering the surrounding trees transport the visitor into a Gross Arnoldian world.
The artist duo Katalin Kortmann Járay (1986, Budapest) and Karina Mendreczky (1988, Budapest) have been working closely together since 2019, creating large-scale, accessible installations from a spatial collage of different elements. Their collaborative works combine different techniques and materials to create metaphorically feminine spaces, typically including textiles, photographs and sculptures made of iron, clay or porcelain.
Paul Kortmann, the contractor who assembled and welded the iron elements in the duo's previous installations, is present in this installation as a participant with creative qualities. As such, the bench can be seen as a new collaboration between the contractor and the design duo.
The theme of the installation, designed for the Sziget Festival, evokes the spirit of the Gross Arnold world. The central element is a bench and its iron structure, with a welded, towering (elements between 1 and 2 metres) iron flower and plant arrangement, which appear partly as schematic elements lifted from the ornamentation of the urban building, and partly as photo-based images of the natural element that inspires the plant ornamentation itself. It is into this scene that the visitor is placed: the Gross Arnold flower symbolism and the animated flower-face motif, often used by the artist duo, is embodied here by the visitor/viewer himself, as he sits down and thus lends his own face to the plant environment. The ornamentation, composed of 2 and 3 dimensional elements, and the photo-based parts, together with the living participant, appear and form a whole as a gradually schematising, transforming extended collage.
Structure: the bench support structure is composed of iron bent elements, on which are welded the cylindrical and circular iron elements bent to shape, which form the stems of the plants. Some of the flower heads are composed of collected antique and cast iron fence elements.
Figures printed on large-scale alu-dibond plates enlarged drawings and a curious mirror, brought to life by the Gross Arnold Gallery, will add to the atmospheric magic, bringing to life the lovely two-dimensional works of artist Gross Arnold (1929-2015) on a larger scale and connecting them with today's young festival-goers. Another centrepiece of the installation is a work of art made by restoring an old Thonet mirror frame and marrying it with one of Gross's curious paintings of sunflowers. The sculpture-like object, which is free-standing in the space, and the other elements of the installation, were created by the artist's son, András Gross, by extending and respectfully caring for the work of his father, and thus the transgenerational creative work was not only theoretically but also actually realised. The more than 80-year-old bentwood frame and the drawings from 60 years ago in large format, in a completely new location, in a festival, in a lovely grove, far from the sterile world of exhibition spaces, present in a new context the common theory of several generations of artists, the importance of harmony between nature and human.
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