Tara Beata Racz / Hybrids
Solo exhibition
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
"The first theme of painting was an animal," writes John Berger in his essay Why Look at Animals? from 1977, and continues: "Probably the first color was animal blood. If we go deeper into the past, it is not unwise to assume that the first metaphor was animal." The relationship between man and animals is a relationship that has grown and changed over time, and it is a relationship that is rooted in the diversity in which man discovers what really makes him human. Therefore, animals represent metaphors, a system of symbols that carry archetypal meanings. Nikola Visković, in his contribution to cultural animalistics Animal and Man (1996), points out that language, subconscious, customs, but the field of imagination in general are flooded with images of animals. They speak for man and speak to man who is observed in that mirror, and therefore there is almost no animal image that does not say something about man. The animal is revealed in the human, and the human is revealed in the animal.
In her painting cycle Hybrids , Tara Beata Racz does not illustrate animals. As in the previous cycle Transanimalia, the painter visualizes images of animals through an extremely intuitive painting process guided by the methods of gestalt psychotherapy. The archetypal motifs of animals that emerge from her works are the product of metamorphosis, a change that occurs when the author transforms an abstract painting into a figurative work. Namely, Tara Beata Racz conducts the artistic process gesturally, in an action-oriented way, placing the canvas on the floor of her studio. She enters the painting with her body and uses various painting techniques and materials such as acrylic and oil to create an abstract composition through intuitive action. As Rudolf Arnheim emphasizes in his 1985 essay Double-edged Reason: Intuition and Intellect , intuition is much more difficult to understand because we mostly know it in her works. Her way of acting escapes consciousness. She is a gift from nowhere and is therefore sometimes attributed to superhuman inspirations. Thus inspired by her own intuition, Tara Beata Racz creates layers, sometimes pasty and sometimes azure, from which animal hybrids eventually emerge . It should be emphasized that the author holds a master's degree in painting and psychology, a practitioner of art therapy, especially gestalt psychotherapy, whose postulates lead to the formation of her astonishing bestiary. In the 2021 essay The Process of Formation and Destruction of Gestalt through Collage Making , she herself describes the modus operandi of her psychotherapeutic work, but at the same time she also talks about her own painting process: "In terms of Gestalt psychotherapy, when we talk about the figure, we actually mean what is in the current focus of the person's interest and what is important and significant in the present moment. The figure is formed at the moment when a certain need arises in our consciousness and we direct our attention to it. (…) The most dominant need stands out and becomes a figure in the field of organism/environment. This figure directs and organizes the behavior of the person in the field until that need is effectively satisfied. On the other hand, the background is everything that is beyond the current consciousness, that is, the entire context of phenomenologically important factors from which the figure emerged. This includes all our past and present experience, ideas, memories, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, unfinished business, and the like. Namely, the figure can only be experienced in relation to the environment, and without the figure, the background is only a part of a larger obscure figure. (…) (Radionov 2013)." In the context of the cycle Transanimalia and Hybrids, this figure is animal[1]. It is created from layers, the author finds it circling around the canvas, as if she were pulling it out of the depths of the abstract painted layer where it has been since the first brushstroke. Because indeed, it has always been there, in the hidden corners of Tara Beata Racz's mind. In this way, it harmonizes the inner image with the external one. Because, after all, already in the Neolithic period, the animal becomes a symbol that visualizes the experience of the world. It should be emphasized that among the cave drawings of southern France and northern Spain, and among the decorated objects found from the Atlantic coast to Siberia, animal motifs are convincingly dominant. However, in addition to pictograms and ideograms that appear in the forms of conditionally speaking first art[2], the drawings that appear are also psychograms, or, as Nikola Visković emphasizes; emotional states expressed through color and composition. Therefore, the author concludes that the interest and expressive effort of the prehistoric artist was focused precisely on animals. Likewise, the colors that Tara Beata Racz uses, the elements she creates with free strokes playing with different forms and textures are a reflection of the emotional situation. In a similar way, the author acts by creating complex mosaics of suggestive motifs that reveal their essence through careful observation. Thus, the entire compositions represent credible psychograms that belong not only to the author, but also to the viewer of the artwork. In their own way, the observers interpret the character of colors, shapes, but also the symbolism of various animals that can be as personal as they can be universal, archetypal. As Gilbert Durand writes in Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (1991), "Of all the paintings, indeed, images of animals are the most common and the most general. It can be said that nothing is closer to us since childhood than the depiction of animals."
Maja Flaissig
[1] It is interesting to mention pareidolia, the human tendency to distinguish certain forms in different textures, such as faces on the bark of a tree.
[2] Various theories treat cave drawings as elements of sympathetic magic, rites of passage, etc.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Tara Beata Racz was born in 1991 in Zagreb. In 2016, she graduated in psychology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and for her achievements and commitment during her studies, she was awarded two Dean's Awards for Excellence. In 2019, she graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Prof. Ksenija Turčić. During her studies of painting, she was awarded four Rector's Awards.
So far, she has exhibited at several group exhibitions, of which Coloristic Dialogues at the Forum Gallery (2018), They Are Leaving at the Glypotheque of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2019), the 5th Biennial of Painting at the Croatian Association of Artists (2019), the Festival of World Literature at the Josip Račić Studio of the Modern Gallery (2019), InFLUence at the Travno Cultural Center (2020), They Are Here at the Slavko Kopač Gallery of Fine Arts (2020), The Situation at the Forum Gallery (2020) and at solo exhibitions at the Marija Jurić Zagorka Library entitled Psychonautics (2018), at the Bunker Youth Center called Meeting Space (2020) and at the Zlati Ajngel Gallery called Transanimalia. At the 5th Biennial of Painting, she received the HPB Award for Young Artist.
Workshop "Metaphorical Self-Portrait – Animals as Teachers"
In addition to the solo exhibition as an accompanying program, the author of the exhibition "Hybrids" - Tara Beata Racz designed a workshop called "Metaphorical Self-Portrait - Animals as Teachers".
The workshop is based on the basic principles of art therapy. In art therapy, the emphasis is on the fact that the image is in closer contact with the unconscious, and that a person's thoughts and feelings that come from the unconscious find their expression in images rather than words. As a person expresses his inner states, thoughts, feelings and experiences through the verbalization of these contents, he can become aware of his inner conflicts and repressed aspects of the psyche. The idea behind this workshop is that participants explore their own self-concept and self-presentation through animal metaphors and symbols.
The aim of this workshop is to help an individual adapt to the new challenges in their environment through artistic and creative activities, to encourage self-understanding, to develop empathy and compassion, and to improve the quality of life.
- Number of participants: 5
- Workshop duration: 120 minutes
- The workshop is free of charge.
We kindly ask all interested parties to contact the author and workshop leader directly for information and applications at:
The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.
The exhibition can be viewed during the working hours of the Gallery (Mon-Fri: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., 6 p.m. – 8 p.m., Saturdays: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.) until May 3, 2021.
