Almine Rech New York is pleased to announce Szabolcs Bozó's third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from June 27 to August 2, 2024.
A self-taught talent who excelled at making contemporary art from the moment he turned his playful doodles into expressive paintings, 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. When a Spanish gallery noticed his enticing drawings on Instagram, it offered him a residency in Mallorca and the rest—as they say—is history.
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. Referencing the traditional Hungarian carnival celebration known as Busójárás—where people sport masks, horns and animal skins while masquerading and parading through the streets and dancing to folk music—he expressively painted his frolicking animal characters with wit and charm.
— Paul Laster, editor, writer, and curator
About Szabolcs Bozó
Szabolcs Bozó’s oeuvre revolves essentially around the fields of drawing and painting. Completely without inhibition, his iconography displays a regressive and joyously school-boyish attitude, whose more subversive flipside emerges from beneath this apparent innocence. In a short space of time, Bozó has forged a style that is immediately recognizable. His flashily colored zoomorphic creatures are set against a white background that is not always perfectly clean, but whatever the case, the essential idea is to communicate energy, abundance and humor.
Painted in large format, his characters often seem cramped within their frames, as if inflated by an excess of tenderness. Taken as a whole, his oeuvre appears as a gallery of endearing creatures, with a human expressiveness that is occasionally all too human.
Szabolcs Bozó (b. 1992 in Hungary) lives and works in London.