In Zsuzsa Szenes’s hands, wool became a line as well as a soft surface. The curatorial text for the Budapest Gallery’s past memorial exhibition describes her guiding bundles of unspun wool across canvas as she had previously drawn with a pen on paper. It is a vivid account of a creative turning point: the same gesture continues in another material, changing a drawing’s scale, surface and presence.
This studio profile considers the relationship between textiles and design thinking. Szenes belongs to the history of Hungarian textile art rather than a newly announced clothing collection. We focus on a question in her practice that remains productive for clothing and accessory designers: does a material merely carry an idea, or does it also force the maker to think?
A line changes material
Art historian Márta Kovalovszky’s account states that Szenes studied at the College of Applied Arts between 1951 and 1955 and began by designing printed textiles and curtains. That is an important starting point. Here, textiles already occupy a practical setting: a surface divides space, filters light and relates to the rhythm of an interior. Her later autonomous artworks create a different situation.
The wool technique developed after her drawings of the 1960s was not simply a transfer of an image onto another support. The unspun material’s thickness, softness and irregularity help determine how a line is perceived. The curatorial description also mentions colours and mirrors. A line need no longer remain a sign read on a single plane: surface and the viewer’s position begin to matter.
A contemporary designer cannot use this as a ready-made recipe. A particular relationship between wool and canvas does not automatically produce a solution for a coat or bag. The thinking can travel, however. It is worth examining what disappears and what emerges when drawing becomes weaving, embroidery or three-dimensional decoration. The choice of technique then becomes part of the content.
When a useful object becomes a question
By the mid-1970s, Szenes was transforming familiar objects with textile methods, according to the Budapest Gallery text. The emphasis shifts from inventing a decorative pattern to asking what transformation does to the original object. When a surface becomes unexpectedly soft, or an object loses its familiar usefulness, viewers have to reconsider their relationship with it.
This shift matters to fashion too, although the artworks should not be treated as garments. An outfit has both a visible shape and a pattern of use. A pocket, opening or stiffening element is not merely form: it enables or restricts an action. The textile-art example encourages us to reconsider even a familiar detail before calling it mere decoration.
Changing material becomes truly interesting when it also shifts an object’s meaning.
Artpool’s archive separately documents a Szenes work dated 1980 in the context of Textile without Textile, preserving evidence of this experimental environment. It is a different source from the later curatorial career overview: one records a specific work’s archival presence, while the other interprets the trajectory of an oeuvre. Together, they show why a single technical label is insufficient for Szenes.
Looking back towards paper
The curator describes her final decade primarily through graphic work. Small paper compositions brought together written signs, ornament and colour. Scale changed again, but attention to surface, the sign and a material’s own behaviour remained recognisable. This is not a story about one medium’s victory.
Wool drawing also directs attention to the scale of decoration. A thin line on paper can appear thicker and weightier in textile, changing its relationship with the unworked surface around it. After a small sketch, a material sample therefore becomes a separate design task. It reveals not only whether a technique is feasible, but the rhythm and proportion of the detail. A sample that differs from the drawing is not necessarily a failure: it may offer an insight that paper alone could not provide. Szenes’s career gives this open, reciprocal practice a historical perspective.
For Hungarian readers, textile history is therefore not a remote professional sideline. It holds ways of thinking that can help us understand the details of contemporary clothes. Next time we encounter an embroidered surface, we should ask not only what it depicts, but how its meaning changes because it is made from fibres, can be touched, has thickness, and behaves differently from a line drawn on paper.
Related: Mariska Karasz’s modern silk clothing
