Sprawlers
Szervezés:
Sprawlers
Eszter Szabó: Sprawlers
(Installation; 5 oil paintings on polyester with sound; 2026)
This site-specific installation, consisting of five 2 x 3m oil paintings and accompanying soundscapes, was created specifically for the foyer of the House of Music Hungary. The characters, painted onto translucent material, exist in a free-form space and time—one that prescribes no specific activity—much like the space occupied by visitors arriving for events. As the audience fills the area by lingering, sitting, or conversing, they become the backdrop to the images; the curtain-like paintings blur the boundaries between reality and the depicted scene.
The elderly figures in this series dismantle a classical antique statue and its associated cultural tradition, reclaiming the space with their aging bodies, provocative, brazen spreading, and the rearrangement of the statue’s elements. The portrayal of the elderly women who are busy sprawling is deliberately free of essences attached to "old age" and "femininity."
The disassembled fragments of the antique statue seen in the paintings evoke the statue of Venus and its pedestal from Lucas Cranach’s 1546 painting, The Fountain of Youth. This work is a continuation of Eszter Szabó’s 2025 drawing series titled To the Left and Below the Fountain of Youth.
More info:
Rock Troubadours (US, 70s): CSNY, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Roy Harper
eSzínház Online: Mátyás Antal, József Balog, Gábor Boldoczki and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra
