Kata Legrady

The first monograph on Kata Legrady’s works presenting a collection of drawings, photographs, sculptures and video-installations. Kata Legrady (Hungary 1974) belongs to that long line of artists for whom an object offers the stimulus for artistic thought. Her approach takes the form of a symbolic encounter between weapons of war and confectionery. The Smarties are used to decorate weapons so that in her hands machine guns, grenades and knives become strange and colourful, almost beautiful and appealing. The series Bombs and Candies began in 2008 and forms a corpus of great formal and conceptual coherence. At first sight there is no precise message, no hidden aspect. We are not dealing with complex and stratified arrangements of images or objects but with restrained, frontal and simplified compositions. They are carriers that, as Jeff Koons put it so well, are there “to stimulate and activate the viewer’s mental and physical state”.