Mária Kudasová - CAVES AND BEINGS

The exhibition will last from January 8th until February 2nd, 2003
Opening hours: 1 p.m. - 6 p.m. except Mondays

From the Introductory Word by Jaroslav Kořán, Prague April 7, 1994 for the Exhibition Caves Within Us.

...Mária Kudasová is interested in what persists and endures - what still remains long, evidently very long after there is no one to reflect it.

Mária Kudasová is primarily interested in the detail, a trifle raised to a whole, a Blakean "world in a grain of sand..." - all the same whether there be question of a human face, recordings of traces of a tortoise's droppings, a miniature still life or a miniature gesture... or a stone - for stones are an obsession with the author, whether we term them love or a curse. To be sure, Mária Kudasová is not - as if it would not suffice - only a photographer. She is, in addition, an expert at drawing, and I must admit that her pure, dematerialized drawings took my breath away when I first saw them. The eighteen artefacts which the author has today submitted to our attention, combine both the professions. The picture of a stone from the depths of the Mesozoic or the Palaeozoic, gnawed-through imprints and colours of mosses, lilacs and trilobites or some deuces, hieroglyphs of wormy trails and corridors of Jurassic meal-beetles - traces from bygone aeons - is overlayed by drawings from our present times. One message overlaps another. Enchantment Words are evanescent. Let us keep mum and listen to those voiceless criss-crossing messages. Let them not be sent out in vain.

From the Introductory Word by PhDr Zdeněk Pospíšil of May 4, 1993 to the author's Exhibition in Prague:

Mária Kudasová does not perceive reality through five senses only. From her own self-scrutiny she knows the role played in our lives by intuition and dream. And it is precisely from an "extra-rational" knowledge that she offers us a further mode of perceiving reality.
She herself tells us that she photographs her dreams, visions and fusions of the micro- with the macro-world.
The author's portraits primarily capture those into whose interior she has intuitively penetrated and found there playfulnes or mystery, or both. Moreover, these are often people who had directed her toward new topics and a new style of judging - who had uncovered new worlds for her. Her vision of her photomodels then leads her to strange arrangements, rather demanding on the models and staged, occasionally downright ironic, situations. ...
Maria's photographs often bring in some sort of sign plays that give rise to numerous possible explanations of reality. Does Mr. Saudek soar or is he plummeting, is it dragging him headlong down to the bottom or is it clinging to him like a leech? Is it his luck or his curse? Has Assoc. Prof. Schlemmer just landed or is he about to take off? You just decide yourself...