TAMAR HENDEL GALLERY

Fall/Winter Juried Exhibition

Fanni Somogyi

Janus
Steel, soil, cactus
13″ x 15″ x 8″
2021
$565

Artist Bio:
Fanni Somogyi is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer living and working between Baltimore, MD and Budapest, Hungary. She completed her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Interdisciplinary Sculpture and Creative Writing. Somogyi’s work explores organic and inorganic networks, metamorphosis and how humans relate to nature and non-human beings. Her primary materials are metals and natural objects. She has shown work at the Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, MD, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA, New Collectors Gallery in New York City, NY, and the Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA among many. Recently, she showed a new body of work in Annmarie Sculpture Garden’s Juried Exhibition, “Strange Paradise”, which explored metamorphosis in surreal landscapes. Somogyi has had temporary public sculptures at the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, the Olala Street Festival in Lienz, Austria, and at Art Market Budapest in Hungary. When she is not metal fabricating she can be found researching, or avidly writing poems, criticism, and essays.

Artist Statement:
Themes that I explore in my work are cross pollinations, hybrid creatures and speculative scenarios. Primarily, I investigate interspecies connections to understand how I affect non-human beings and the ecosystem, and my embedded connection within my lived environment. I’m fascinated by entities such as the slime mold and cyborgs and drawn to the tentacular sensory methods of octopuses since these collaged bodies act as speculative thought exercises in developing empathetic collaborative survival strategies.

I build biomorphic assemblages, which are vessels for metaphors and stories of re-imagined bodies and landscapes. I predominantly use steel and aluminum to fabricate my sculptures, and combine these vessels with casted polyurethane elements, screens, and natural beings, such as cactuses, mosses, and micro greens. I enjoy the contrasting interaction of these materials. I’m drawn to metals’ relation to industry, and their oxymoronic ability to be simultaneously durable and malleable. After the work is finished it becomes an object that I continue to care for.  Good craftsmanship is essential and the labor that goes into making each object is also an important aspect of the process. Time spent making is also time spent conceptualizing.

Through my practice, walks in forests are a crucial meditative activity, and often a starting point for projects either as object collection or photo and video documentation, which at times also become elements of the sculptures. This activity feels essential in probing my growing disconnection with nature. While a hyper-technologically infused world is my reality, I seek out intimate connection with nature. Works created in 2021, were also influenced by my experience of lockdowns and the realization that our bodies are ecosystems for other creatures. My works offer a fragment of nature, archived, or re-imagined, in the hopes of inducing the viewer to seek out more.

Website: www.fannisomogyi.com