Agnes Erdos

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What on earth is the Mechagodzilla Rabbit?

Bizarre associations, surreal figures

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Young Jewish artist from Budapest, Emil Für is having his first exhibition in the UK at the Spiro Ark gallery. At the opening reception, where Emil serves his own home-baked scones, I’m fortunate enough to have him give me a personal guided tour and explain his choice of themes, symbolism and colour schemes. “Back at home”, he tells me, “I’ve achieved everything I wanted to achieve – my name is well-known, my pictures sell, and hundreds of people have turned up at my exhibition openings.” But he wants more – he feels Hungary has become too small for him.

His art? Pretty unusual. Like illustrations to a story book for adults: in a surreal twist, he presents his individual take on fictional and mythical figures known to all. Angels dressed as hasidic men, mischievous devils dancing with Torah scrolls and wearing tefillin; Houdini the escape artist having breakfast with Dracula impersonator Bela Lugosi.

Für’s amusing images are full of irony which he thinks is a core element of Jewish thinking. What was it like for him to grow up Jewish in Hungary? “I always felt, and was made to feel, different, no matter what I did; I was always ‘the other,’” he says. Later, he lived in Israel for a few years and the country’s hot sand and piercing bright sunlight left an enduring mark on his art, reflected in the white sky and orange ground in all his recent paintings.

So what’s this thing about the Mechagodzilla Rabbit? Godzilla is the gigantic monster of the popular movie, and Emil’s rabbit is a unique version of that character, mechanized into a robot-like creature, alluding back to Mr Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and also bearing some resemblance to the Golem perhaps...? 

 

A world of contradictions; protective angels and friendly devils. Mirrors separating real life from a grotesque dream realm make us lose our sense of what’s truth and what’s fantasy. Through his artwork, Emil Für has been seeking some inherent wisdom hidden behind the uncertanties and doubts that characterise a man’s, especially a Jew’s, experience in this world.

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