Mai Manó Gallery ("Kis Manó")

The human body and female nudity especially has been one of the most beloved subjects in the arts since the beginning. Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form discusses the difference between nudity and the nude. In his terminology, a nude is a piece of art that presents the female body according to the norms and expectations of the given era, idealized and removed from reality. He claims that “[n]o nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.” This way, of course, we arrive at the frequently asked question about the relationship between photography and reality; however, we evidently react differently to objects and situations portrayed in art than we would in life to the same objects and situations.
In Orsolya Juhász’s photos, we see strange torsos of a female body. These images were taken with the excitement of exploration; an excitement that is not aroused by the model’s body but by the genre of nude photography. Her photos are finely composed black and white photos in which the human body is not an erotic object but the joyful unit of forms and shapes drawn by light. The young photographer’s first individual exhibition employs the language and tools of classic photography in order to expose her way of thinking and current understanding of the genre.

Luca Gőbölyös

The Hungarian national scholarship for photographers was named after one outstanding master in Hungarian photo art, József Pécsi (1889-1956). His name is familiar by now as the grant has assisted more than 100 young photographers in their artistic endeavors. In 2011, the Hungarian House of Photography – Mai Manó House announced a photo competition titled “József Pécsi, then and now” on the occasion of the Scholarship’s 20th anniversary. The competition called for creating paraphrase(s) that re-interpret, think further, or reflect on József Pécsi’s original pieces: their technicality, world, era, and creator. The winner of the competition – Orsolya Juhász with her piece The Tempter based on Pécsi’s Table spread - was awarded with an individual exhibition in the Mai Manó Gallery.