Reading"Zsofia Schweger’s paintings..." More fromWork Contact Advertising Opportunities Newsletters Insights + Opinion Creatives + Projects Advice + Resources Culture + Lifestyle Nicer Tuesdays The View From... POV Forward Thinking Review of the Year Jenny Brewer Olivia Hingley Ellis Tree Elizabeth Goodspeed Liz Gorny Extra Search but frequently returns to visit her family house leaving the interior preserved as Zsofia remembers it For her series of paintings named after the town she has examined this odd situation and the feelings it provokes “I’ve become interested in this idea of frozenness and abandon; about a feeling of alienation and discomfort while looking at something that I otherwise have very fond memories of,” she says The paintings are expressive in their eerie stillness like cartoon backdrops waiting for the characters to arrive and animate them Zsofia makes small drawing studies on site in Sandorfalva then brings these back to her London studio to develop she applies inviting colour combinations that make you want to spend more time with them which “serves to lock you out” A flat wall or piece of furniture stops the eye and limits the depth of the composition conveys how she feels about her childhood home now She also plans the exact composition and colours in advance which allows her to keep the paintings single-layered and completely flat with the white of the canvas showing through blocks of colour “I think this gives away a sense of anxiety and alienation,” she explains The 27-year-old artist currently has her first solo show Bloc, curated by Becca Pelly-Fry, at Griffin Gallery where she is completing a six-month residency She has also been selected as one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Further Infowww.zsofiaschweger.com Jenny Brewer Jenny is the online editor of It’s Nice That She was previously It’s Nice That’s news editor Get in touch with any big creative stories Fancy a bit of It's Nice That in your inbox Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative world Instagram TikTok LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Pinterest About Careers at It’s Nice That Privacy Policy Insights Residence Creative Lives in Progress If You Could Jobs © It’s Nice That 2024 · Nice Face Logo © It’s Nice That www.zsofiaschweger.com Hungarian artist Zsofia Schweger moved away from her home town of Sandorfalva ten years ago The 27-year-old artist currently has her first solo show Bloc, curated by Becca Pelly-Fry, at Griffin Gallery In preparation for his archive show in London we caught up with the artist to uncover some of the stories behind his most renowned letterpress prints and to celebrate the birth of the poster and manifesto that has come to define his career The Japanese graphic artist uses space and shape to conduct scenes that feel spiky The artist Hannah Lim took to the Nicer Tuesdays stage last month to share the many facets of her vibrant practice she demonstrated how she’s been unpacking the 18th Century aesthetic trend of Chinoiserie through the lens of her mixed Chinese the museum reaffirms its mission to defy the erasure of trans non-binary and intersex lives from history with a show-stopping collection of hundreds of objects from the community About Contact Advertising Opportunities Newsletters Insights + Opinion Creatives + Projects Advice + Resources Culture + Lifestyle Nicer Tuesdays The View From... POV Forward Thinking Review of the Year Jenny Brewer Olivia Hingley Ellis Tree Elizabeth Goodspeed Liz Gorny Instagram TikTok LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Pinterest Careers at It’s Nice That Privacy Policy Insights Residence Creative Lives in Progress If You Could Jobs “My personal narrative shapes the conceptual thinking behind the project which in turn shapes my technical process,” Schweger believes “I’ve been interested in the definition of home and ideas of local identity and the emigrant experience.” graphic paintings of the interiors of her grandmother’s home in Hungary are something like an excavation of memory: a record of absences and multiple belongings as we’ve relocated to London – yet most of our old furniture and belongings are still there Semi-bare with little sense of time and place they suggest the inhabitants have long gone The artist intentionally jars her soothing colour scheme with no coherent lighting source and a disorienting perspective rendering this home a place of both affinity and impenetrability “I make use of alluring colours as I want my paintings to be attractive and inviting but at the same time I apply paint in a reductive manner hinting at a sense of alienation,” the artist explains “I like the idea that the paintings invite you in but also lock you out.” The white of the canvas sometimes shows through blocks of colour while her freehand strokes create small trembles in the application of paint; a gentle spilling-over of borders The title of the series itself also weaves biographical detail: with 'bloc' without the 'k' implying the Eastern Bloc which ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall the year she was born Three pieces from this series will be exhibited among the year’s other Bloomberg New Contemporaries from November 23 until January 22 Schweger’s paintings are as much a study of her changing relationship to her homeland as to this particular house Schweger is influenced by her own experience of migration as well as that of other émigrés throughout generations Art is intimately connected to the process of coming to terms with displacement She points to the example of Sylvia Plachy a photographer who fled Hungary as a child following the 1956 revolution going on to publish photos of her visits home – now as a semi-outsider – over decades “[Plachy] assigns critical function to art in times of political crisis writing that ‘art could and had to sustain you.’ I like this notion,” Schweger muses “[Plachy] made her private experience public It’s a powerful and useful work of art.” That art can be a form of sustenance during times of political crises is a thought that subtly informs her work memory and identity runs beneath her seemingly serene paintings making these works all the more unexpected and surprising Schweger herself seems to discover this layering as she goes along approaching the process with an openness that suggests an artistic maturity beyond her years: “when paired with the narrative of my project the paintings can sometimes be seen as political Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016 runs from November 23, 2016 until January 22, 2017 at the ICA, London Four women got drunk and somehow managed to steal an entire bus on their way home at 2 a.m The women stole the bus from the bus station in Sándorfalva, a small town 14 km from Szeged, Csongrád County. Then, the delinquents drove around town for an hour, Index reports The women decided to leave the playground where they had been drinking because they were cold They went to the bus station and somehow managed to open a parked bus two of the four offenders worked for the bus company as cleaners and therefore they knew how to operate the vehicle without its keys They continued to talk and drink inside the bus Things escalated quickly when one of the women got behind the wheel and drove around the station Later they left the station and headed towards the streets nearby they decided to visit a tobacco shop in Szeged a bus driver who lives in Szeged and was supposed to start his shift at dawn They thought it would be fun to surprise him The delinquents returned to the Sándorfalva bus station around 4 a.m their wild adventure resulted in 1,800 Euros worth of damage to the bus itself As one of the four offenders is a juvenile The woman who was driving the bus is facing DUI charges and all three adult women face charges of unlawfully taking a vehicle and website in this browser for the next time I comment Y"},"category":false,"taxonomy":{"active":false,"name":"category"}},"markup":{"custom_html":true,"wpp-start":"","wpp-end":"<\/ul>","title-start":"","title-end":"<\/h2>","post-html":"{thumb} {title} {stats}<\/span>{excerpt}<\/p><\/li>"},"theme":{"name":""}} You have successfully joined our subscriber list SupportUs Newsletter © 2025 DailyNewsHungary | All rights reserved The thermometer indicated 18.7 C early on Sunday in Sándorfalva the highest temperature ever measured in the country on April 29 The previous record for the day was 17.4 C Weather forecast for Monday: Sunny in the morning scattered showers in the afternoon with strong southerly winds As we wrote few weeks before, the hottest dawn was recorded in both Budapest and Hungary, the national weather service said on its Facebook page. 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