Romance Apocalypse: Maria Szakats | Brooke Benington
Maria Szakats uses a format that is traditionally domestic, modest and feminine: small embroidery panels. The artist laboriously stitches a cotton toile backing together, then tops it off with long, fluffy strands of mohair. Sometimes, she then worries the surface of the finished work with a metal brush.
The format matches the subject matter: portraits of women, trees and flowers, such as Pivoine, pictured below. So far, so traditional. But the contrast between the materials pulls focus in interesting ways. In this example, the flower of the rose is picked out sharply; its leaves and its background are woozily ambiguous, swirling.
Pivoine (2024)
These small panels hint at big things. One clue’s in the exhibition’s title - Romance Apocalypse - which signals epic catastrophe. The title stands in dramatic contrast both to the scale of the works and the subject matter. But the title describes what Szakats is really going for with her embroidered flowers and ladies.
The mohair strands blur our perception. We can make out part of the scene, not the whole. The panels are strokably soft and fluffy, but they also signal something untamed and uncontrollable. Romantic as in wild and sublime. Even apocalyptic. We all know that some domestic dramas can feel that way. So intense that the background blurs.
I suppose you can work through these kinds of feelings by painstakingly stitching an embroidered panel together, blurring it into semi-illegibility with mohair, then hacking at it with a metal brush.
Romance Apocalypse: Maria Szakats is at Brooke Benington (London). 29 November 2024 - 25 January 2025