Ágnes Uray-Szépfalvi: What's next...?
1 December 2022 – 3 February 2023

Opening: 30th of November, 6 pm

Opening speech: Erzsébet Tatai, art historian

What’s Next...?

Saviours, victims, refuge

A selection of works made between 2002 and 2022 that have never or rarely been shown spreads across INDA Gallery’s four rooms in Ágnes Uray-Szépfalvi’s current exhibition.

Like the show’s title, borrowed from a work (What’s Next...?, 2005) on display here, all the paintings, drawings and videos demonstrate one of the signature themes in Uray-Szépfalvi’s oeuvre: the questions of “...okay, so far I understand how we have got here. But what’s next?”, or “Alright, it was then. And now what?” The still images record situations – frozen images of familiar or seemingly familiar stories. Through direct biblical and mythological references, or by indirect ones in the form of allusions to art history and to classics of film history, sujets, parables, allegories, characters are transposed to our day, with their relevance reinterpreted (or questioned), their meaning reinforced or recontextualised. For instance: To what extent is Jesus’s gender part of his essence (Supper, 2007)? Or from where, from what landscape, from what age is this boy in the shirt with its collar half out bringing us the lamb? (Shepherd Boy, 2022)?

While the protagonists in some of these narratives are males, or rather, adolescent boys before maturing to be men, the main motive connecting the works is the female role – woman appearing in situations sublime or banal, tragic or comic. And, as is characteristic of her entire oeuvre, here too, Uray-Szépfalvi, displays great consistency coupled with natural deftness in choosing her points of view, her forms of presentation from her wide arsenal of techniques ranging from classical painting to film.

Curator: Zsolt Kozma

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