Nora Szirmai

Torn wings of bugs, veins of drying leaves, enlarged maps of neural pathways are arranged into abstract lines of force to sit on the floor as separate entities. It's amazing when a microscopic world suddenly reveals itself in all its magnificence, many times its life size, its complex, masterfully designed systems and relationships that we were not even capable to imagine as the building blocks of small organisms, our bodies, and the systems of the world.

Nóra Szirmai's works are based on the observation of natural motifs and networks: I am immensely interested in relationships, systems and networks including human relationships, the complex structure of the psyche, the interconnection of neural pathways, as well as emotional interconnections. Hence my fascination with forms where these things are present in tangible, visible forms, such as the veins of insect wings, vascular networks, plant elements.

All of my works deal with this theme. The way nature has resolved these connections is fantastic, and for me it adds to that the mentality that focuses on connections that are intangible or only visible in special circumstances. On the one hand, the works are rewritten and magnified natural forms, based on the softest, most delicate phenomena, but also expressed in one of the hardest, most rugged and masculine materials: steel. The physically demanding working of this hard and heavy material, i.e. sculpting steel, therefore results in exciting tension with the lightness of the forms and the delicate balance that most of the works create. For many of her sculptures, Nóra draws inspiration not from nature, but from unconscious energies, perhaps not even expressed at the level of our own sensations. As she says,

„My forms often mix childhood inspirations with the absurd realities of adult life. Emotions, sensations, moods, concepts and sights that are difficult to express in words are my sculptures. They are largely the result of an instinctive, emotion-driven creative process.”

All in steel. Steel is not usually found in sculpture representing our unconscious, rather in structure lifting equipment. The painted steel structures, especially in the colours that Nóra uses (yellow, orange or red), add to this industrial feel, as they evoke heavy industrial equipment paired with the typical colours of building engineering. The delicate and ethereal quality of bird wings and angel wings is thus combined with the materiality of steel, the robustness of steel sculpture and the garish yellow colour. The tension is further heightened by the fact that Nóra works on a large scale (her sculp tures are usually human height), so the works are not small or restrained, and their softness is matched by their immense strength. Perhaps because of their size, we can also sense that the works are a kind of living being, with their own personality, spirituality and emotional charge, and that their entity is not necessarily related to the phenomena they are meant to represent. The wing is therefore not (just) a wing, it is much more than that; the neural pathway is not just a map of cellular connections, and the leaf goes far beyond the drying and fading, ephemeral beauty that awaits us in the autumn woods.

Nóra Szirmai graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2010, majoring in sculpture. In 2009, she studied sculpture in Italy. In 2021, she graduated from the Budapest Art Mentor program. She has exhibited at the Káli Art Park, the Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna and the Budapest Young Art Fair.

Delia Vekony