May 4, 2022 - June 11, 2022
The crisis of female roles, the issues of the female body as well as self objectification are reoccurring topics and motifs of Klára Petra SZABÓ. Her latest works are presented by the titleLet me dissolve the madness that confuses youin VILTIN Gallery. The exhibition this time also comprises of two simultaneous, yet intertwining series, one builds on jigsaw puzzle like female torsos, which were already apparent in her previous works, the other one is consist of the painted process of fictive and real landscapes.
Klára Petra SZABÓ?s own body provides the raw material to her aquarelle paintings of her self-reflection, this way dissolving female roles, acts and stereotypes. She recollects those intimate and fine stories and personal experiences, which model situations well known to us, meanwhile carrying elaborate symbolic meanings. By proposing questions through her own examples on female roles, her self examination can offer a support to extensive female social identity issues. She lends her own self to universal narratives of femininity, by doing this her stories are closely related not only to her own, but to the concepts of womanhood. Her aquarelle drawings reveal a reality, where the woman appears as the only role-player, hence displaying the world through herself. Besides, talking about an individual, herself, who lives, processes, and dismantles traditional female ideologies, her works can be interpreted as salvation to a one-sided viewpoint. She builds characters who take action, conscious, and contemplative, meanwhile talking about the sufferings and reformation of the manifestation of collective female memory.
Her previous series are forerunners of her newest works. The central motif of Shades of Loneliness, Black Box andThe Collector was also her. The Black Boxseries SZABÓ discloses traditional and one-dimensional role models of the artist, the woman, the wife and the potential mother based on the seemingly harmless, yet unbidden remarks of her colleagues. The Collectorwhich features pinned-up female body part compositions exposes the mental state of the artist.
The new works contemplate the lack of intimacy and sexual frustration, the power of insomnia keeping one between reality and dream, the feelings of longing and yearning. The combination of the before mentioned swirls like a whirlpool as a vision like and surreal collection of images. The animals known from nature documentaries and their behaviours, the recreation of well-known landscapes, insomnias ability of creating stories and formulas, as well as the dark backdrop of the drawings representing a consistent night-time are all points of reference of the constantly changing narrative on the memory net of the possible and the actual. Still, the detailed and narrative trademark aquarelle drawings of the artist allow the viewer to look into a psychological level, where the questions of self representation lead to the deepest analysis through empirical experiences and the world of dreams.
Klára Petra SZABÓ (1981, Hódmezővásárhely) graduated in 2009 at the University of West-Hungary. In 2011 and 2013 she received the Gyula Derkovits Scholarship and in 2014 the Gyula Rudnay Art Scholarship. In 2019 she was granted with the Tornyai-plaque, the main award of Hódmezővásárhely Autumn Exhibition. She took part in numerous artist residencies between 2010 and 2020 (Austria, South Korea, Estonia, Japan, Sweden). Her animated installations were shown at several international art festivals in the past few years. Beside her local exhibitions, her works were presented in curated solo exhibitions in Austria, Estonia as well as South Korea. She is a member of Studio of Young Artists Association. Her works are in the collections of Kiscelli Museum, ICA-D, Museum of Szombathely, János Tornyai Museum, and internationally in the Susan & Michael Hort Collection, New York, Landesgalerie Burgenland, UniCredit Bank Austria AG, Mino-Washi Museum.