At the core of Eszter Szabó’s exhibition entitled ‘Adjustment’ are animated installations created with a painterly approach. True to her practice the works lack a linear narrative, while offering multiple points of engagement in time and space.
This selection from the past two years fits into Eszter’s interest in the social representation of women and in visually scanning the basic mental-emotional character of the individual – middle-aged or ageing women. Looking more closely, it presents works where the starting point is a specific reference in the history of painting.
Eszter appropriates late Renaissance portraits of unknown women. As she puts it, she re-frames them, “peeling them back” from their historical time, to dismantle the representational function of the image, to dissect and demystify the features of the faces. The process of dismantling and then reassembling, by making subtle corrections, binds the works in the exhibition into a new cycle.
An exciting novelty is that these portraits-blocks now appear in a loose, DIY installation environment that reuses found materials. In contrast to the neutral medium of the monitors, these solutions also have the potential to extend the portrait in a painterly and situational way. For example, the confinement of a woman’s face, which is classically made the object of gaze, in a peep-box, where the artist also offers an alternative way for the gaze to meet through the casual, silent conformation of the viewer peering from behind and the portrait looking back over her shoulder
The notion of “adjustment” is nothing more than an attempt to get to the heart of the matter, a visual diary of women’s experiences in the present – with non-verbal notes like patterned accessories or the truth of a flesh-cutting bra strap that slips out of place.