SZIRMAY, Marte, 1946-
Untitled (Sculpture)
Fearing Russian repression after the Hungarian
revolt, Marté Szirmay’s parents emigrated,
arriving in New Zealand in 1957.
Her stepfather, Frank Szirmay, was a figurative
sculptor in the academic tradition, but her own
interests were in abstraction. Study at Elam
School of Fine Arts in the 1960s brought an
appreciation of the Russian constructivist
brothers, Naum Gabo and Antoine
Pevsner, and their engineering
aesthetic but not their literalism. In
her own work she sought to
naturalise manufactured materials
including steel and resin, deploying
them to describe shapes derived from
nature such as the koru as well as to
make purely abstract geometrical
forms.