Text by Katalin Keserü Dr

art historian, professor emeritus

The presentation summarises what and how we know about Ildikó Csete, textile artist, and György Csete architect, dividing their oeuvres into periods, thematising the periods according to common traits, examining the affinity of ars poetics between the different materials of architecture and textile art, techniques and functions.

Ildikó Csete was a student at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts from 1959, and between 1961 and 1973 she was a designer at the Goldberger Textile Printing Factory. Her husband György Csete studied at the Budapest University of Technology and later worked at the National Ore and Mineral Mines. He worked as a designer for the Ore and Ore and Minerals Company. György Csete worked in Pécs from 1970 and Ildikó in their home from 1974 – a period marked by collaboration between the Pécs Group of architects and craftsmen. For both of them, the 1970s were a time of ideas, experiments and the first masterpieces. In the context of the universe, nature and folk art, the formulation of identities of form, structure and meaning: the creation of a centre, centrality and at the same time open structures through the reinterpretation and magnification of the wall and the ornament. György Csete was at the forefront of the architectural turn, Ildikó of the design turn.

György Csete was a staff member of the National Environment and Nature Conservation Office between 1978 and 1988, and later of ARBOCOOP in Szarvas; the study explores the unity and identity of wall and roof, the concept of the “dwelling”, the unity of writing and image on textiles, based on a collection of sources from Hungarian folk art. Carrying forward the “embroidery of writing”, Ildikó Csete undertook a monumental-scale “rewriting” of medieval language monuments in Gothic and Runic script. György Csete (with fellow architect Jenő Dulánszky, a structural engineer) built a series of chapels and church