ARTIST STATEMENT

For years, my artistic interest has been in the pragmatic and metaphorical “search for home” within broader sociopolitical and personal contexts. The common experience of losing one’s sense of belonging due to professional, personal, environmental, social or political pressures creates a collective longing for safety and stability.

My visual language blends abstract forms with utopian visions. Just as memories surface in fragmented glimpses, these artworks can offer the feeling of familiarity, providing comfort and a framework for envisioning the uncertainties of the future in proportion. My work is a complex structure of personal, surreal, metaphorical experiences and memories. Abstract paintings – infused with figural moments and symbols – evoke the atmosphere of nostalgic longing, shaped by my Eastern European roots and my ambivalent Slovakian-Hungarian dual identity. In my artistic practice, I explore themes of nomadic existence, time, memory and absurdity.

The collage, as a starting point of my work, becomes technologically and, in the broader sense, artistically philosophical through the principles of option and selection. Within collage I work with three media: paper, canvas and installation. In all three cases, I turn the existing pieces of my images into new compositions, aiming for a zero-waste approach. My small-scale paper works serve as forerunners or studies of my paintings. Through a collage and de-collage process of tearing and covering, I build layered compositions that open up shifting spatial dimensions. The overlapping surfaces form an imaginative archipelago of space that invites visual exploration. I use the visually illusory technique of trompe-l’oeil, where the hues and gradients have a paramount role in emphasizing the depth of the paintings’ surface.

Inspired by late modernism and neo-avant-garde traditions, I embrace variety through repetitive forms, echoing the ludic spirit of Dadaism. I handle the canvas as an organic component: in the first phase, I crease, iron or fold it as a textile. When I choose not to stretch on a frame, then the parts are sewn together and used in the installation. Expanding the boundaries of the painted surface, I incorporate materials such as textiles, paper, carpet, and wood to create site-specific situations that highlight the tension between painterly elements and thematic concerns, exemplified in my “schMERZbild” series inspired by Kurt Schwitters.

Rita Koszorus
2025