Zsófia Schwéger’s project Balancing Act is a series of staged still lifes. The recurring objects in the paintings—an old table, chairs, and a set of Anker building blocks—were purchased by the artist in 2022 to model the composition of a painting. “Over time, we started using the furniture in the kitchen of our studio apartment, and in the fall of 2023, the blocks reappeared: on a day filled with creative anxiety, for lack of a better idea, I started playing with them.”
Her painting is motivated by her experiences living abroad: she examines the relationship between people and space in general, and the concept of home in particular. The personal narrative that developed during his years in America and England aims to simultaneously depict absence and presence, immobility and the passage of time, closeness and alienation. For Schwéger, painting is both observation and space creation: home is not a predetermined place, but an experience built from repeated gestures.
These questions live on in her latest works, but the focus is now on the connection between everyday life and artistic practice. A scene recurs in the paintings: two chairs and a kitchen table, which is no longer just a place for shared meals, but also a space for playful creation. The tabletop is the center of the composition, with building blocks on it. The complex structures are made possible by the innovative 19th-century manufacturing method of Anker blocks: the blocks are made from a mixture of stone powder, linseed oil, and blue, yellow, or red dye. They are heavier than traditional wooden building blocks, and therefore more stable. Nevertheless, Schwéger’s structures seem threatened with collapse.
In the almost dramatic moments before collapse, the lightness of play is replaced by the compulsion to repeat: reconstruction seems unavoidable. What at first glance appears to be an exercise in repetition reveals itself to be an exploration of the creative potential of time and play. Play practiced as a method is the driving force behind the new paintings. The building blocks become both a theme and a metaphor: a structure of thought and a symbol of instability, echoing the ever-present possibility and uncertainty of a new beginning.
The Balancing Act series engages in a close dialogue with the artist’s earlier works. Her interest in spaces and structures, which until now had been organized around the abstract concept of home, now finds new form in the gesture of tangible construction and physical play. Her painting continues to be driven by a desire to create order in space, but this order is no longer stable, but temporary and fragile, questioned again and again.
The compositions evoke the quiet precision of Charles Sheeler’s Doylestown interiors, where space is both intimate and architectural. In Schwéger’s work, precision is always uncertain: the brush application of acrylic paint is strictly homogeneous, but the traces of the hand never disappear, and the contours tremble slightly. The size of the paintings, the table placed at eye level in the composition, the subtle use of linear perspective, and the life-size depiction of the cubes all serve to allow the viewer to relate to the space with their own body. Viewing the painting thus becomes an exercise in presence.
At the same time, the tension in the works is created precisely by the absence of human figures. The chairs seem to be waiting for someone, while on the table, the unstable structure preserves the imprint of a hand, of attention. In connection with the theme of absence, Schwéger draws inspiration from Giorgio Morandi’s restraint and his balancing act on the borderline of intimacy. The attempt at dialogue with Morandi’s still lifes is most noticeable in the pastel compositions on the small canvases.
The smallest Balancing Act paintings focus on Anker cubes. The infinitely variable, playful compositions promise the security of formalism, yet threaten collapse. The repetitive gesture of building and starting over is also an experience of everyday existence, where stability is an illusion and attention is the work itself. The questions of home and belonging explored in earlier paintings now appear in the gesture of building, in the movement of the hand placing cube upon cube.