Operating Room Painting

Kata Soós is a versatile artist. She is a painter a cultural anthropologist and also a filmmaker. Her works are enigmatic, they do not surrender to our interpretations easily. We need time to unravel Kata’s artistic standpoint. The theme of her paintings are the objects of our everyday life: shabby washing-up bowls, hospital spaces, paper bags: the seemingly uninteresting milieu around us. Kata Soós is interested in the non-trivial behind the trivial. She is a genuine anthropologist. The Other and herself as an artist are in the focus of her films: how she sees the Other or how the Other allows her/himself to be seen. Human beings are not actually depicted in her paintings, yet it is human life that she attempts to explore. The iron is till hot, the vessels are messy, so you have just been on the spot a moment earlier. Soós can grab the fragment of the second that almost no one is capable of: the moment of passing. You have just disappeared from the picture. Kata is able to paint your or my absence, and me, who is looking for you can find you and myself in front of the telephone booth or in the hospital bed or before the lonely flowerbed. Author: Enikő Bódis, cultural anthropologist