Marté Szirmay

Marté Szirmay (born 1946) is a Hungarian New Zealand artist whose works are held in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Biography Early life

Szirmay was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1946. Fearing Russian repression after the Hungarian revolt, Szirmay's parents emigrated to New Zealand in 1957. Her step-father Frank Szirmay began his artistic career as a painter, but by the 1970s he gained a reputation as a sculptor of bronze figures. Frank Szirmay's most notable public sculptures include Young Nick (Gisborne), Tangaroa (Tauranga), and The Spirit of Napier (Napier).

Szirmay attended Auckland Girls' Grammar School from 1960 to 1964, where she preferred the sciences, and then studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1968 with a diploma of Fine Arts with First Class Honours. Szirmay's interest in science from school influenced her later sculptures which centred around the imagery of organic living forms, such as shells, eggs, seed pods, fossils. For her, sculpture is a means of "paying homage to the organic." Szirmay gained a teaching qualification in 1969 from the Auckland College of Education, and continued to teach art in secondary schools and university extension programmes. This work was fabricated to her instructions by Roskill Sheet Metal Works. It is located beside Lumsden Green, close to the Khyber Pass Road–Broadway intersection at Newmarket, counterpoised with Virginia King's Sliver across the pedestrian crossing. For nearly ten years, Szirmay continued to work with metal as her preferred medium.

Following the Smirnoff Sculpture, Szirmay carried out a series of public commissions for institutions and corporations, most of these in aluminium or stainless steel. These included works for the University of Auckland's medical school, and a work for the University of Otago Medical School, both in 1975. One of Szirmay's most ambitious public commissions was in 1987 for the Chase Plaza, Auckland. The work, featuring running water and steel construction, was unfortunately dismantled when the Chase Corporation went bust during the stock market crash of the late 1980s. Beginning with her cast-aluminium group shown at the Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery in 1971, Szirmay has worked in series. In the two years following, Szirmay travelled to Europe, and while in Britain she was in touch with sculptor Anthony Caro who may have prompted her to investigate the use of colour in her work.

Szirmay held the presidency of the New Zealand Society of Sculptors and Associates from 1977 to 1978, and again from 1985 to approximately 1989.