I happened to catch a recent lecture by Arthur Danto at SVA here in New York City called “Embodied Meanings.” It was an excellent talk in general about how, contra certain formalist readings, meaning is an important component of contemporary art indeed.
Anyway, in illustrating his point he spoke much of the work of Ágnes Eperjesi, a Hugarian artist who currently has a show up at the Hungarian Cultural Center. The blurb on the website says: “Since the 1989 change in Hungary’s political system, Eperjesi has been systematically collecting images and graphics printed on plastic, such as commercial packaging, plastic bags and wrappers . . . taking the humble sign language of ordinary household chores, and recreating them as objects of beauty and irony.”
In Danto’s essay (forthcoming) he writes: “in transfiguring the isotype into an art work, an interesting reversal of Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction has taken place: the art of mechanical reproduction has acquired, through transfiguration, an aura . . . Eperjesi’s easthetic enhancement of workday images is as distinctive as Andy Warhol’s transformations of Polaroids into portraits.”
Her own website can be found here.
Her show is only up until March 6th. I think she’s doing something great, really great. So go see it.