Artist Klára Tamás has donated both Davids and Goliaths and Phoenix, two of her monumental tapestries to the Textile Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest. The significance of the donation lies in the continuity these works establish with the Renaissance and Baroque pieces through their exceptional size (4.3 × 2.8 m and 5.9 × 4.8 m) within the contemporary textile collection of the museum.
Klára Tamás was born in Marosvásárhely (now Târgu Mureș, Romania) in 1946 and was trained as a graphic designer at the Ion Andreescu Academy of Fine Arts in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). Between 1972 and 1982, she worked for the Kolozsvár-based publishers Meridiane and Kriterion as a graphic designer, following which she settled down in New York. Although she moved to Budapest six years ago, the two tapestries had been designed during her time in the US. Both are based on her own paintings, which were then transformed into colour maps for the purposes of the two hand-woven aubusson tapestries. While Phoenix was woven by ten individuals in the course of two years, David and Goliath took one and a half years to complete. Many prestigious state museums own works by Klára Tamás, namely, among others, MoMa (New York) and Albertina (Vienna) hold some of her graphic works.
