Agnes Szepfalvi at Vizivarosi - Budapest, Hungary - Review of Exhibitions

The narrative paintings of Agnes Szepfalvi, whatever the situation depicted, all have at their center a herculean female protagonist -- someone whose commanding aura pervades the work and looks in a sense, its real control For this exhibition -- nine untitled oil paintings and six small drawings -- Szepfalvi move rounded her attention to the wedding ceremonial serving up unlikely images of spring brides and nuptial pageantry. (The series, titled "Italian Suite May 1996" was inspired by means of a visit the artist made to Rome)

Szepfalvi draws on both commercial and art-historical sources in her work, playfully recasting them to suit her emergencys and here she gives her wedding imagery a purposefully kitschy air. Idealized wedding scenarios prepareed from popular culture, the mass media and advertising haunt the viewer with their false familiarity, while tight cropping and soft-focus overlays imbue Szepfalvi's compositions with the kind of nostalgia imparted by the agency of photography. These strategies, which have been used to similar issue by such other artists as Gerhard Richter, are greatest in quantity evident in one canvas that depicts a newly joined pair riding happily in an lay open carriage. Rendered in a mut range of heather virids and dusty roses to put in mind of a faded keepsake, the exhibition is shown from snapshot distance and strangely echoe well-known images of the wedding of Jacqueline and John F Kennedy

allowing these works are conceptually a little cold their richly attended surfaces and confident appropriations from art history attest to the artist's hold passion for painting. The exhibition's centerpiece, a somewhat regal portrait of a bride-to-be dominated by means of her flowing white gown, vividly recalls Velazquez's Infanta Margarita. And in an obvious nod to Manet, a young woman beams as she and her coming time companion rest upon a great virid lawn. While such borrowings are clearly proffered in the spirit of homage, Szepfalvi also perceive s free to make them her own: her female bring under rules are all thoroughly modern, despite ambiguities of time and place, and their strident confidence defies their traditional clothing and deportment.

Szepfalvi belongs to an emerging generation of painters in Hungary engaged in reviving the illusionistic positions of their medium while simultaneously embarking upon a form of postmodern critique. She is also individual of several women artists whose gender-conscious investigations are gaining fresh ground in the national arena. Beneath her paintings' seemingly saccharine facades lies a considered questioning of the cultural apparatus, high and depressed that defines the female identity.

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