Erzsébet Schaár: Street

The monumental ensemble of life-size figures and structures was created by Erzsébet Schaár using Styrofoam, an easy-to-cut, malleable material, as well as textiles, tow, plants and mirror glass.

Erzsébet Schaár graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1926, but her portrait sculptures were admired as a child. She was known as a portrait sculptor until 1966, but from the 1960s she also made full-length sculptures in addition to portraits. Meanwhile, he was preoccupied with spatial problems, searching for the relationship between the urban man and his living space. The result of this was the 24-metre composition "Street", presented in 1974 in the Csók István Museum in Székesfehérvár. He created this monumental ensemble of life-size figures and buildings using Styrofoam, a material that is easy to cut and shape but also easily destroyed, as well as textiles, tow, plants and mirror glass. After the exhibition in Székesfehérvár, some of its details were shown in Lucerne, at the Venice Biennale in 1982, in Stockholm in 1983 and in the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. The delicate works of fragile material in the possession of the Pécs museum were made after careful experiments and years of work in a timeless plaster and plastic version. "Street" has been on display in the garden of the museum building at 5 Káptalan Street since 1991. Its independent protective building was designed by the architect István Janáky.

Erzsébet Schaár has transformed enclosed and open spaces into sculptures in the "Utca" ensemble. Building walls, doors and windows evoke the relationship between man and his environment. In the sculpture-street composition, the life-size sculptural figures behave in the same way as in reality: they look out of the window, stand at the walls, but they exist motionlessly, timelessly in this space. The viewer can feel that they were there a long time ago, in the past, and will be there in the future. They are creatures that are permanent in the passing of time, artistic representations of the inescapable interconnectedness of man and space and time.