Kata Legrady: Bombs and Candies

The first monograph on Kata Legrady's works presenting a collection of drawings, photographs, sculptures, and video installations. Kata Legrady belongs to that long and bountiful line of artists for whom an object offers the stimulus for artistic thought and action.  Her work takes the form of a symbolic encounter between two distinct universes: on the one side, weapons of war, and on the other, confectionary. In other words, there is a short-circuit between the lethal and the inoffensive; a tension between childhood and destruction, between carefree and suffering.
The use of Smarties--those famous multicolored 'pills'--cannot but evoke the "colored dots" used by Roy Lichtenstein to create his enlarged and framed comic strip images. With the difference, however, that these Smarties are not used to create images but to decorate weapons, covering them systematically, although this is not enough to make them unusable or unrecognizable. In the hands of the artist, machine guns, grenades and knives become strange and colorful, almost beautiful and appealing.
There are also bombs of various formats and size, varying from a few centimeters to several meters. This time, they are not recovered objects, however, but sculptures of essential form covered in metallic industrial paint.

Kata Legrady was born in 1974 at Bacs in Hungary. She studied music and singing at the Pecs Conservatoire before finally opting for the plastic arts. She lives and works in Hanover, Germany.