Nikolett Balázs, a member of the MŰTŐ collective, graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2016 with a degree in painting and has since received several significant awards: in 2020 she won the Secondary Archive Young Woman Artist competition, which was presented during Manifesta 14 – Prishtina 2022. In 2021 she was nominated for both the Leopold Bloom and Esterházy Art Awards, and two years later she was the first Hungarian artist invited to the SACO Biennale in Chile, followed by a 2-month residency program of the Visegrad Fund in New York. In February 2024, she had a solo exhibition in Bratislava titled Born Free. In her artistic practice, Balázs explores and reinterprets the dichotomies, generational, social, cultural and societal value crises that define and surround her, both aesthetically and substantively, in a raw, revealing act of letting go/resolving, in a constructivist synthesis of self-searching and self-reflection from a female perspective. In her work she uses the techniques she learned from her parents and grandparents, who worked in agriculture and manual labour in Létavértes, near the Romanian-Hungarian border. She kneads, plasters, screws, sews and cuts rubber tubes and canvas (burlap), metal shavings collected from the MÉH (waste utilization company) site, XPS sheets from construction waste, until the materials are reborn as a harmonious collage, which nevertheless evoke the makeshift solutions of small villages, their harsh but cozy “foul-up-aesthetics”. Nikolett Balázs describes her own works as “object clutches” that reach down to deep layers, offering a visual and haptic experience, a social and ecological imprint, through their abstract, austere structure, yet proliferating symbolism (Palást (Cloak), Szomjas virág (Thirsty flower), 2022). The works Hozzávalók (Ingredients), Origo and Fészek (Nest) (2021) are maternal metamorphosis stories of the sublime materials that have to be extracted from the “smoothness aesthetics” of the present, confessional monuments to self-portraiture, bodily representation and inner lyricism. Annamária Szabó