SZABOLCS BOZÓ: TÜKE
Almine Rech New York announces the exhibition Tüke by the artist Szabolcs Bozó. A self-taught talent who excelled at making contemporary art from the moment he turned his playful doodles into expressive paintings.
June 27 - August 2, 2024
Szabolcs Bozó has been exhibiting his colorful canvases and spirited works on paper internationally since being discovered on Instagram in 2018. Break-dancing his way through Milan to London in 2012, the young artist started drawing cartoon characters inspired by his native Hungarian folklore while working in a restaurant.
Motivated by his maternal and paternal grandmothers, who had been painters and puppet makers yet never had a chance to exhibit their works beyond their local communities, Bozó began creating vibrantly colored drawings and paintings of carefree, rambunctious beasts on paper and canvas.
Rendered in a raw manner with brushes, oil sticks and fingers on the floor of his London studio using acrylics, the emerging artist’s animated paintings of these surreal creatures quickly caught the attention of art critics, curators, collectors and other dealers, which soon led to five international solo gallery shows, three solo museum exhibitions and fifteen notable art fair presentations over the past five years.
Another noticeable change in his work is the nature of the painting’s anthropomorphic creatures, which have become less animal-like and more human. Hipster rats wear pants and sneakers; leaping rabbits have hands and feet; and candy-colored bears tout umbrellas, which have unfortunately been blown inside out.
In the quietude of the studio, without assistants and only a flip-phone to avoid internet distractions, the tenacious painter gets into a zone, becoming one with the characters he’s rendering on the canvas. Each brush stroke invites a reaction with the addition of another kind of mark. Like the Abstract Expressionist artists of the 1950s and Neo-Expressionist painters of the 1980s, things happen in the process—mistakes are painted out and new elements are added.
Titled “Tüke,” which is a slang term for the people of Pécs, the ancient city where the artist was born, the exhibition is steeped in memories of his hometown while capturing the dynamic energy of London, with Bozó’s vibrant paintings portraying the surreal nature of life in both realms today.