Book of History

Mária Lugossy and her husband, Zoltán Bohus, are respected sculptors who have brought contemporary Hungarian glass to the attention of an international audience. In 1973, Lugossy earned her graduate degree in fine arts at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest, where she also pursued postgraduate studies from 1973 to 1975. Although Lugossy’s work in glass looks fluid and smooth, like forms made of molten glass, her production is limited to cold-working techniques. Within the parameters of cold-working, which involves the use of cutting and sandblasting equipment on sheets of industrial plate glass that have been glued together, Lugossy skillfully achieves a diversity of effects. These effects range from a hard, waterlike transparency to areas of soft, almost blurred erosion. Light is an essential element that animates and sculpts the surface, and both reveals and obscures vague, undefined shapes within the mass. Her forms often appear to glow from within, like light shining underwater. Her multimedia installations were atmospheric and abstract, but always—like her sculptures—grounded in the physical world. Lugossy’s sculptures are abstracted landscapes, reminsicent of geological formations, or perhaps the minerals, crystals and geodes that Lugossy collected and in which she recognized the “eternal order of the geometry of nature.” The works have an air of antiquity, as if they were excavated from the earth rather than made in a studio, and her evocative titles encourage rumination on the relationship of nature and time, and past and future. In Book of History, Lugossy draws a correlation between layers of earth strata and years of human knowledge, understanding that experience has always been inseparable from environment.