Image: Center for Modern and Contemporary Art Debrecen
The Center for Modern and Contemporary Art Debrecen, better known as MODEM, is presenting a retrospective exhibition of Kányási Holb Margit’s textile art, with a curator-led tour scheduled for July 8 at the museum in Debrecen. Titled Anyagba vetett rítusok, the exhibition runs from June 14 to August 9, 2026, and is centered on the life’s work of the Ferenczy Noémi Prize-winning artist, who worked from 1950 to 2025.
According to MODEM’s exhibition materials, the show traces a body of work in which textile moves beyond the realm of utility and becomes a carrier of bodily presence and spiritual experience. The institution says the retrospective follows the artist’s development from a period that coincided with the rise of the Velem Textile Art Workshop, founded in 1975, when experimentation with spatial, conceptual and installation possibilities became a key force in the renewal of Hungarian textile art.
MODEM places Kányási Holb within that broader shift in textile practice, noting that she developed a distinctive weaving technique while connecting craft knowledge to contemporary art questions. The exhibition text emphasizes that her work increasingly transformed textile from a functional material into an autonomous artwork, with gestures such as covering and revealing, binding and untying serving not only as technical solutions but also as expressions of the works’ conceptual and emotional layers.
The exhibition is also framed through the artist’s family and collaborative artistic environment. MODEM says that her shared thinking with her husband, the visual artist Fátyol Zoltán, explored the possibility of art as a spiritual mediator, while works made with their child, the photographer Fátyol Viola, open further perspectives on the exchange between media and the visual representation of memory. The exhibition is curated by Áfra János.
The July 8 program gives visitors a chance to encounter the retrospective with guided interpretation at MODEM Modern és Kortárs Művészeti Központ. The event is listed for 18:00 at the museum in Debrecen. A separate curator-led tour is also advertised on the museum’s ticketing page with Ferencz Kincső named as the guide, indicating the institution is programming additional interpretive events around the show.
The exhibition matters because it places a major figure of Hungarian textile art within a contemporary museum setting at a time when textile, craft and material-based practices continue to gain new attention in art discourse. By presenting Kányási Holb’s work as both materially innovative and spiritually charged, MODEM is also reinforcing its recent practice of foregrounding artists connected to Debrecen and the region through focused exhibitions that link local artistic heritage to wider conversations in contemporary art.
