Timea Tihanyi is a Hungarian born interdisciplinary visual artist and ceramicist living and working in Seattle, Washington. Tihanyi holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary; a BFA in Ceramics from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston; and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington.
Tihanyi’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands, including Shepparton Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum, Mint Museum of Art and Design, Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburg, Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, Foundry Art Center, International Museum of Surgical Science, SculptureSpace NYC and the Museum of Glass, Tacoma. She has received many recognitions, including the 2018 Neddy Award in Open Media, a 2018-19 Bergstrom Award, and a New Foundation travel grant. In Seattle, her work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions at Gallery 4Culture, CoCA, Consolidated works, Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Gallery, Davidson Contemporary, and SOIL Gallery. Her work is represented by the Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle.
Tihanyi is a Teaching Professor in the Interdisciplinary Visual Arts program at the University of Washington. She is the founder and director of Slip Rabbit, a unique mentoring space for experimentation and learning at the intersections of art, design, architecture, science and engineering. Slip Rabbit is the first technoceramics studio in the Pacific Northwest.
Timea Tihanyi’s artworks probe conditions of subjectivity and objectivity. They explore the connection, and sometimes conflict, between intuition and logic, emotion and rationalism, the physical experience of the body and the cognitive experience of the mind. Her work invites direct participation and desires interaction.
Tihanyi uses materials as sensory and sensual clues. In her spaces and sculptures a complex narrative is being set up by using both rules and accidents, repetition and contrast. The inner logic of each artwork recalls axioms and algorithms set up by the rational mind; only to have these wilfully interrupted and completely undone by playful improvisations with possibilities of freedom sought out in the interstices.
Tihanyi often invites the unexpected into her practice by engaging the world directly through projects of interaction. These may take forms as diverse as environmental interventions, collaborations with factory workers, writers, mathematicians, and various communities, an international word-exchange, a mock corporation or a functioning digital research lab, but they also share a larger context of investigation into how we create connections of various kinds with which to learn from one another and make sense of things. She asks: What kind of knowledge is attainable through direct experience, physical labor and other actions of the body and what is the nature of the understanding that abstract theory and logic brings us but direct experience cannot grasp? Where does tacit learning reside; and which truths are more authentic, more practical, expressible, and useful? Tihanyi is interested in how we comprehend and know things, and how epistemological questions have been framed and reframed over time by neuroscience, art, mathematics, and philosophy.