Eszter Szabó
>65_2053

About the exhibition

The weird mathematical formula in the title demonstrates a fact, a very simple situation: the people in the paintings and videos exhibited at the Videospace ­Gallery will be over 65 in 2053. With some mental arithmetic (in which we cannot not help now) it is easy to figure out how old they are now. They are the young people of today. Márk, Szilvi, Ádám and Kati stare back at us from oil-on-plywood pictures painted with the traditional technique – and on the other side, they thell their stories in computer animations. Szabó can do the somersault backwards too, into the past, as it appears from the paraphrase of the old, 15th century painting (by Sassetta, exhibited in the Louvre), projected onto the window of the gallery.

This bridging of the planes of time inspires us to think about the constant change of artistic styles, and in this case, also about the past, present and future of painting.

About the artist

Born in 1979, Eszter Szabó belongs to the young generation that started their artistic carrier after the fall of the Berlin Wall, using media art in a natural way as part of their studies and daily life.

Her art explores two main areas: painting, which is a recording of manual gestures, and moving images on screens. Strong and characterisic images emerge from the combination of these two media. The small watercolours are sensual and precise portraits: everyday people with shopping bags, big bellies, unfitting clothes, depicted with delicate but accurate lines.

This kind of sensitivity is manifest in Szabó’s animation videos, too. Peculiarly, the videos are based on traditional artistic and graphic techniques, although the world of her scenes refers to the digital universe of our age: human desires, everyday sufferings and the characteristic moments of life.

Eszter Szabó's page

Sponsors of the exhibition