Atmospheres – Paintings of Hajnalka Siska-Szabó

The Transylvanian artist, a guest of National Széchényi Library, introduces her works to be displayed at the exhibition as follows:
“The current exhibition is a selection from the “harvest” of the past five years including oil and acrylic paintings. My paintings evoke the spirits of Nagybánya painting, in landscape details and re-interpreted compositions created from local impressionistic effects but filled with expressive colors. Like through a camera lens, zooming in on landscape details from a realistic presentation, showing everything from a bird’s vista, which then becomes abstract. Water means infinite winging to me, but it also means the magic appeal of depth and whirl. In this dual imagery, human figures tend to embody a philosophical message.”

Ars poetica of the artist:

“Why do I paint? Painting is an inner compulsion for me, the only way I feel my life is complete. In painting, colors and lights are the most important for me, I am a true colorist. For me, there is no painting without colors. I see even human soul in colors. Above all, I love to paint outdoors, I need the impression. Landscape, nature and trigger of the experience form an inner picture which starts to live its own life on the canvas. Colors determine atmosphere, they move onto the painting via a subjective filter.

From then on, it is only the painting that matters to me. As a seismograph, it detects and reflects my feelings, my mood.”

Critical assessments:

“Transylvania is an enchanted fairyland, and this is proved by the paintings of Hajnalka Siska-Szabó, too. Present-time ballads conceived in the past, moods born in the foil of duality are talking. Mood of the human region where light stalks above shadow and soft voice stalks above silence.” – Csaba Gülch, journalist

“Became acquainted with a lover of colors, lights, air and water, a lover of nature who plays easily but, at the same time, rather seriously with impressions born on the spur of the moment, flashing their dramatic as well as lyrical sides.” The world of water is an ever recurrent motif in the creative art of Hajnalka Siska-Szabó, opening up a unique opportunity of scenic manifestations for her. The artist loves to play with forms given by reflections, with the confrontation of reality and the world of forms created by moving water surface. – Júlia Németh, art critic, vice-chairman of Cluj-based Miklós Barabás Guild

“She is a painter who embraces the playfulness of water surface with an unlimited desire for freedom, in order to visualize, with her temperament and through the filter of her momentary emotions, the eternal motion of nature. The trademark of the artist is that she uses cold controlling colors with expressive strength, which is counter-pointed by latent warm colors. These are the blue colors, sometimes the purple ones, which become controlling colors in the color atmosphere of her paintings.” – András Breznay, painter

“We do not necessarily have to search for the rich imagery of the symbol set (…) Perhaps we do not have to go into the details of interpreting symbols either. Gate motifs are built in this structural versatility, also involving some depth beyond the world of spectacle, like the numerous ways of presenting water, which is renewed during the course of the day and through ages, which is fired with storms but is also capable of symbolizing channels of the soul (water of life, sea of freedom, etc.).

Earth tablecloth besotted with light as a trigger of landscape variations is interesting because this chain of motifs also reflects a strange vision, partly reality-motivated but somehow bordering magic, like any painting reaching out to the world of the unseen…” – Lajos Szakolczay, Attila József Award winning writer and art critic

Venue: National Széchényi Library, Buda Castle, Building “F”, H-1014 Budapest
Date: The exhibition can be visited between June 17 and July 11, 2015, Tuesday to Saturday between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Visitors who do not own a Reader Pass to NSZL are admitted to our temporary chamber exhibitions for a flat fee of HUF 400.