SCULPTURES – The Metamorphosis of Matter

Existential Figures and Gestural Abstractions

 

"I allow my subconscious to guide me in a meditative, intimate state—where it feels as though the material I shape with my hands is imbued with a spiritual essence. It is as if, in crossing the boundary between the material and the abstract, another reality enters the human dimension."

— Attila Konnyu

 

The sculptures of Attila Konnyu navigate the elusive threshold between form and formlessness, material and spirit. Phenomena, as we perceive them, are always mediated—shaped by the limitations of our spatial and perceptual frameworks. Whether filtered through the lens of individual subjectivity or encountered through the consciousness of another, our experience of reality remains partial and contingent. This echoes the phenomenological thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who insisted that perception is always embodied—rooted in a lived, situated experience of the world.

 

Konnyu’s artistic practice is deeply informed by the psychological insights of Carl Gustav Jung, particularly the notion of the collective unconscious as a reservoir of archetypal forms and shared emotional imprints. Through a process of meditative surrender, the artist enters a contemplative state in which intuition supersedes intention. In this space of interior attunement, sculpture becomes less an act of fabrication than of invocation. The material - clay, plaster, bronze - transcends its physical constraints to assume a spiritual charge. This process resonates with Rosalind Krauss’s writing on sculpture as a medium that destabilizes the viewer’s phenomenological relation to the object, insisting upon an experience of matter as both presence and signifier.

 

Konnyu’s work exists in a liminal zone - between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the ineffable. Form unfolds as a dialogue between materiality and abstraction, conjuring what might be called an ontological ambiguity. This tension aligns with the theoretical debates between Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried, particularly their exploration of sculpture’s capacity to oscillate between objecthood and theatrical presence. In Konnyu’s hands, the sculptural form becomes a portal to an alternate register of being - subtle, intuitive, and resonant with what Henri Bergson described as La durée, or the qualitative flow of lived time.

 

The resulting works are at once gestural and architectonic - hovering between organic flux and structural resolve. They evoke the corporeal sensitivity and existential gravitas found in the work of David Smith and Louise Bourgeois, artists whose sculptural language similarly emerged from a deep engagement with interior states and the body as a site of memory and transformation.​

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