From September 17 until October 16, 2010
at Art gallery Putti

Designer Valéria Fazekas hat exhibition

TIME TRAVEL

Embassy of Hungary in Latvia in cooperation with the art gallery PUTTI.

Valéria Fazekas graduated from Budapest Institute of Applied Arts (today Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) as an accessory designer at the Department for Textile Design. She primarily created hats in leather, then dissociated herself from leather artifacts and designed clothes.  She has evolved hat design as an autonomous art form after recognizing that it is this genre that she can express her artistic intentions appropriately. She established her first showroom in Budapest in 1994, then the second one in 1997.

From her university years on the focal points of Valéria Fazekas’s artistic interests have been the problems of form and structure. When asked about the most decisive criteria for her work, she answers that her work is determined by the conflict between symmetry and asymmetry, positive and negative, regularity and irregularity, statics and dynamics, surface and space. This has been resulting in ‘unique wearable art objects’ – an interplay between fashion and sculpture. She considers her unique or small-series ‘hat-sculptures’ in a certain sense ‘jewels for the head’.

They are, on the hand, sculptural artworks that have an impressive aesthetic effect. On the other hand, they are uniquely shaped functional objects of everyday culture. In accordance, Valéria defines herself not a fashion designer but rather a designer: in her works trends are less important then form-giving. Nevertheless, she always pursues her quest for functionality and wearability.

By Valéria’s own admission, she repeatedly concerns herself with the problem of the utmost variability of elementary geometric forms. She builds her objects of basic shapes and, either creates a multi-perspective architectonic structure of a monochrome material, or enhances the sculptural qualities of the piece by designing them variable.

Valéria’s hats allow their purchaser – most often educated, art-minded people with a passion for creativity – to intervene, to ‘do’ something with them, they can be modified by turning them around or shaping them. She only uses surface decoration to emphasize the utter simpleness of the shapes. Valéria Fazekas regards practicability, variability and playfulness as the main qualities of her hats.

Xénia Golub, Art Historian

Exhibition opening:

tvnet.lv about exhibition “TIME TRAVEL” (link)

nra.lv about exhibition “TIME TRAVEL” (link)

dec.lv about exhibition “TIME TRAVEL” (link)

anii.lv about exhibition “TIME TRAVEL” (link)

diena.lv about exhibition “TIME TRAVEL” (link)