Michelle's exhibition

Michelle Aminoff Hegyi's exhibit Gardens of Love and Fire

Martha Rock Keller's comments
followed by an interview with the artist

Michelle A. Hegyi's entire show has an epiphanous feeling of complexity centered by simplicity. Of elation guided by serious thought. This show is about the line, color, space, and time that underpins everything... The lines and splashes move toward a lightness and airiness that suddenly strikes you as your eye sweeps through a stretch of dense line imagery and then through the simplest means 'sees the light.' All her works are related to one another through the layering of elements. This interconnectedness of works in this show to each other and to work in previous shows lends all the work a feeling of cutting edge sophistication and professionalism. One has the feeling that Michelle's work is fastidious but free, the outcome of focused visual energy that can cut through diamonds - gently.


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MRK: About the title of your show, Michelle, can you tell me more about how that came about? I know the words are from architect Daniel Libeskind whom you met when he was here in Ann Arbor and I know it is the title of his public artwork in the Netherlands.

MAH: It's a title I used for one of the artworks in my solo show at WSG in 2004, Spaces of Encounter. All the works in that show, and also the title of that show were words by Daniel Libeskind, from his book The Space of Encounter, which I found very inspiring. Libeskind, himself, in titling his work in the Netherlands, Garden of Love and Fire, was inspired by a poem written by Juan de la Cruz. 'Gardens' refers to all the amazing stuff in the world that surrounds us. As for 'Love and Fire', I like to work with contrasts such as line versus painterly splashes of color. In Libeskind's title, and in his actual artwork in the Netherlands, a tension, a contrast, is implied between the organic and the geometric.

MRK: How did you get interested in art, Michelle - I know you studied mathematics as an undergraduate? And that you took a dance class with Gay Delanghe and art classes with Jim Cogswell and Mark Pomilio at the U-M School of Art and Design.

MAH: I've been drawing and painting ever since I was little -- I've always loved color and light -- perhaps from my first experiences in the desert in Israel where I was born. I grew up in Buffalo, New York and visited the Albright Knox Art Museum many times as a child -- not knowing at the time how much I would be influenced by their collections of Abstract Expressionists. My mom really encouraged my art -- she was an artist in a way herself, a dress designer. My high school art teacher told my mom I should definitely go into art as a profession.

At the same time I was also interested in math and computer science. In an assignment in my high school computer science class, I was supposed to combine computers with another interest of mine, which of course was art. So, we had to trudge downtown to the boy's technical high school in Buffalo to use the only computer in the city school system (it filled a whole room) for which I designed a program which generated random numbers designating size, location, colors and shapes of objects which I then painted using real paint. This was my first foray into digital art -- long before interactive computing made this feasible.

In college I did major in math (encouraged by my father) but at the same time I was very much into dance and expressing myself through movement in space. A lot of my earlier art was influenced by my interest in dance. (I did paint from life for many years under the amazing tutelage of Ellen Moucoulis who encouraged me to show professionally.)

MRK: Which artists have inspired you? Or influenced you aesthetically?

MAH: There are so many. Richard Diebenkorn most of all but also Susan Rothenberg, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Caio Fonseca, Daniella Woolf, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Jun Kaneko, Nina Else, Eva Hesse

MRK: Any artists from earlier centuries or locally?

For a classical artist I'd say Vermeer, more recently Cezanne and Matisse. Locally, you of course are one of my very favorite artists; also I've been inspired by many other local artists but especially by Lynda Cole, Takeshi Takehara, Mignonette Cheng, and Vincent Castagnacci.


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In sum, Michelle's work has been, and continues to be, a counterpoint encompassing huge amounts of experience and intellectual interest boiled down to a 'to and fro', an easy swing through a landscape of thought and feeling.


-- Martha Rock Keller