On Saturday, May 11, from 2-3, Laky will talk about her practice and work in her solo show at M Stark Gallery, Invent, on view through May 26.
Gyöngy Laky is known for taming the inherent irregularity of her organic raw materials into carefully shaped, often hard-edged compositions. Negative space is the co-star of her practice. During her lifetime she has created no less than six highly distinctive bodies of work: drawings in air, grids, vessels, words & letters, signs & symbols, installations, and (textile) abstractions. Her recent work is boldly political, and all her work is highly original.
Laky came to the US as a WWII refugee from Hungary and grew up in Carmel, fascinated by the counterculture of Big Sur just down the road. When she began her studies at UC Berkeley in 1967, no less than three urgent social movements raged. At Cal, she was indelibly marked by her wide range of study including close work with renowned textile artist Ed Rossbach and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology’s collection of 8,000 baskets. There she experienced the revelation that the raw materials of textiles are living like “sinews, veins, and neurons.”
She made her first sculpture using vegetation prunings in 1968. A seminal trip to India in 1971 for postgraduate study inspired her to embrace her instinct for using common, discarded, and recycled materials. Over the course of her career, she has used twigs, orchard prunings, nails, miniature plastic toys, telephone wire, toothpicks, staples, screws, and a polyglot’s keen observation of the building blocks of language: letters, punctuation, and symbols. Signature techniques include painting the prunings with bright contrasting primary colors and adding thorns using nails or screws.
Laky is a scholar of the movement as well. She founded Fiberworks, the Center for the Textile Arts in Berkeley in 1973 (closed 1987) which offered accredited undergraduate and graduate programs. And she is professor emeritus at UC Davis where she taught for nearly 30 years.
Her monograph Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order, assembled art, actions and art practice, designed by browngrotta arts, Connecticut, browngrotta.com, was released by Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Germany, in August 2022 (328 pages). The book includes essays by Mija Riedel and David M. Roth with a foreword by Jim Melchert. Laky’s monograph documents her award-winning sculpture practice from the 1960s to present.
