Biography
Irén Balázs was a textile artist. Between 1954 and 1958, she attended the Hungarian College of Applied Arts as a student of Pál Miháltz, where she was painting and creating mosaic plans. With her textile works, she appeared in the early seventies and became a defining figure in the progressive textile art.
The embroidered-sewn jute reliefs that characterize the first stage of her art bear a kinship with the folk art design. In her works, she highlighted motifs, magnified and redefined them in space, or shaped figures. The question of crossing the boundaries of the genre constantly occupied her, in addition to plastic reliefs, she created a stuffed scourge, spatial textiles and environmental works in need of sculpture: she articulated the temporal changes of things and the development of the spectacle in an allegorical way.
Some of Irén Balázs' works belong to the genre of conceptual art. In the eighties, it changed to a new art form and created flat works again, With needle painting, she created subtle gradients, transparent planes, geometric shapes, using a repeating motif. Instead of organic motifs, she focused on structure here. A portrait film about her life was made in 2005 and a monograph on her work was published in 2008.
