“Three paper strips, each circa 9 meters long and 60 centimeters wide (30 feet by 2 feet), fall below the colorful cupola through two floors to the foyer (of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest).  

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… before the viewer, three narrow descending forms appear, lightly and supply flowing into the undulating, capricious, and orientalized arched space of the Hungarian Art Nouveau architecture. Within the white walls, the off-white-warm brown-silver ‘triplet’ is subdued, subtly vibrating & pulsating like a full ‘color chord’.  

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Probably, it will enter the mind of the visitor that Silverberg’s three paper strips are a kind of flattened extended Dead Sea Scrolls, Torah scrolls, or Japanese silk paintings before they are rolled up.  And from this perspective, they are actually “books”, “writings” to be read, where the positions of the letters are filled eggshell pieces, tea leaves, and mica. And hopefully, at that moment, it will be clear that the flowing papers not only decorate the white interior of the hall, but in an almost unexplainable way by the light, material, and sinking time, this functional place is raised to the level of a sacred space.”

 

Text by art historian, Marta Kovalovsky published on the occasion of the exhibition of 3 Scrolls at the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, Summer 1994.