Arena (1970-es évek második fele)

El Kazovskij studied painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts between 1970 and 1977, where her masters were György Kádár and Ignác Kokas. In addition to painting, Kazovskij was engaged also in installation, performance and set design. Kazovskij lived in Budapest. Her career as an artist began in the late 70s. Her paintings, installations and performances are metaphors for the birth and death of myths. Her distinctive world of constant motifs is organised around Greek and archaic topos. Her life and the mythical universe are closely intertwined and presupposed. There are no distinct periods in Kazovskij's oeuvre, and the themes and motifs hardly change. Her compositions are structured according to a carefully elaborated and delimited iconographic system. She creates comic-like series of symbolic basic elements: the animal sitting with tense attention, Venus, the Parcae, the scythes - among mountains, cypresses and monuments - in the 'desert sandbox' or in the purgatory with similar connotations. In the late 1970s, she started her performance series, the Jan Panopticon. She combined stage space, movement, text and music with a traditional painterly and sculptural approach. She surrounds still or active animate bodies with architectural and sculptural elements. The central themes of Jan's panoptics are an approach to inaccessible beauty and objectification: the conflict between the personal and the impersonal, the subject and the object. Kazovskij's approach to his art is informed by Greek mythology, which is most evident in his tragic vision of fate.

The painting Arena was painted in El Kazovsky's early years, probably at the end of her college years. Already here, the themes of gender (clothed and nude), loneliness, the stage (and stage-ness), the prominent podium in a neutral space, the interpenetration between stage and egg, or expressivity - all of which characterise El Kazovsky's entire oeuvre - appear. Despite the stage-like setting, it is not a scene that the artist depicts, but a set of relationships between mythicised figures. The composition has a strong structure, with defined contours and intense contrasts of clear and heightened colours. The Arena is perhaps closest to the paintings of Francis Bacon.