visions of a new morning, Eine Ausstellung mit zwölf israelischen und zwölf deutschen Künstlern
Edition Braus, Heidelberg 1996, S.77-80

Emö Simonyi

Emö Simonyi is an impassioned storyteller. In this respect there is no difference between the private person and the artist. In art, as in life, Emö Simonyi prefers fantastic, bizarre stories. With a light, sometimes even hectic hand, she conjures goblins, birdmen, titans or gnomes onto paper. For many years her medium was drawing, mostly the ascetic tusche drawing. Since the mid-80's she has been applying her expressive style to painting.
Pair figurations, constellations taken from myths and fairytales and fantastic stories with comic or ironic undertones are the subjects of her generally large-format canvasses. She is rarely satisfied with just one version of the subject. She takes it up again and again, driving the drawing and composition into abstraction or colour and filling the picture with brilliant painting.
Emö Simonyi has to keep the narrative part of her soul down. Paradoxically, she only finds peace in the explosion of colour. The intoxication of colour quells the urge to spin out the yarn, to urge it on to more and more monstrous events. Landscapes and still-life constellations are the subjects of her richly gestured paintings and at the same time the roots connecting Simonyi to art history. At the Art Academy in Budapest in socialist Hungary she learned her craft; at the same time her contradictory nature was aroused against the tedious transposition of plaster-ofparis models to current topics. Since then Emö Simonyi has been persistently volatile and unwilling to commit herself to anything that appears unchangeable. Her motto is "Keep moving", and it can also be found in her painting as an often fragmented image or counterimage. Simonyi has been living in Munich since 1971, but that doesn't mean that she has settled down there. Like a migratory bird she has wandered over the years wherever an opportunity was available, using every free studio offered her. Three years ago she changed this hectic change of venue into the possibility of steady rhythm: she refurbished houses in Hungary and Italy to live and work in. Since then she has continued to change locales, but now she is at home at the same time.

Heinz Thiel

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