Ágnes Szépfalvi’s last major solo show in a Hungarian museum took place in the István Király Múzeum in Székesfehérvár in 1998. Most of the present exhibition’s selection of approximately twenty-five works from the recent years are exhibited for the public for the first time in Budapest. The drawings and sketches which accompany the paintings put Szépfalvi’s working method into a new context on the one hand and, quite often, can be examined as independent pieces on the other.
Szépfalvi continued dealing with the same topic that she has been treating since the beginning of her career. Most of the characters on her paintings are women who appear in various, yet traditional female roles, such as the queen, the femme fatale, the bride, the exotic woman, the girlfriend, the vulnerable woman, etc.
Szépfalvi has been using photographic images as an inspiratin for her paintings since the beginning of her career, but her recent work is more related to film. (This interest seems to be grounded in her collaborative work – storyboards – with Csaba Nemes.) Montage is a key tool in cinema and Szépfalvi extensively uses this method in her images. It is interesting to note that a given painting is never the result of merely copying a particular photograph; the pictures are rather the outcome of montage. Szépfalvi continues to focus on female roles and analyses them from a cinematic perspective even if the exhibited work is a still (and not a motion picture), and an individually produced, unique object (and not a mass product).
Ágnes Szépfalvi graduated as a painter at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1990. She has participated at numerous solo and group shows both in Hungary and abroad since the middle of the 1990s.
