A display of the work of Imre Schrammel

• 03. October 2000. - 28. February 2001.

Imre Schrammel graduated in 1957 from the Porcelain Department at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts, where Miklós Borsos had been his professor.  He has taught at the College since 1958. In 1959-62, he served as artistic adviser to the Hollóháza Porcelain Factory. In 1969, he played a decisive part in organizing the first Ceramics Symposium at Siklós. He has been a full university professor since 1990. He cooperated in founding the Fine Arts Master Training Institute at the Janus Pannonius University in Pécs, where he has been a professor since 1991. In 1993- 9, he served as rector of the Hungarian College of Applied Arts. In 1996, he was appointed artistic adviser to the Herend Porcelain Manufactory. He is a member of the Kecskemét Group (the first international group of ceramic artists (1980), and a founder member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (1993) and the TERRA Group (1991).

The title of this exhibition is taken from a series of books. The first volume was an edited selection from Imre Schrammel's diaries, which appeared in 1994 as 'Diary 1984-1994' The editors of the Inner Exhibition series are Hedvig Dvorszky and Péter Turcsány.

The exhibition shows a selection of the artist' s work over several decades. It includes sculptures in clay, bronze, fire-clay and porcelain, with a similar variety of subjects: portraits, mythical nude compositions, carnival and circus figures, and so on.

An extract from the artist's dairy: ' It is more worthwhile to refer to ceramics if the art is seen as subsidiary or viewed from an outside vantage point. The question is what direction to take within the activity, where someone should tread an individual path through the luxuriant jungle. There is a possible approach: people battle for survival with their environment on several planes. This battle becomes imbued into their cells and appears in all their creative and non-creative gestures. They select in this battle and identify ingenuous, indifferent and inimical formations, objects and media. The nature of these depends closely on personality, place, time and so on. However, there exist primeval experiences that are retained in people's cells as an inheritance and match in an eerie way the cultures of distant peoples and even the things that children create anew. I suspect that is why the shaping of materials may be akin to things found independently on faraway continents. It is possible to build on these " underlying cases" if a solution to our current state of confusion is sought in the direction of synthesis' (Siklós, November 7, 1984).