20 July - 5 August 2023
about the exhibition
Crafting seemingly undisturbed and pristine landscapes, printmaker Sophia Szilagyi explores emotion and memory through her works on paper. In this exhibition, Sophia’s digital and photogravure prints display her skilful innovation across both contemporary and traditional printmaking techniques. Within her digitally rendered compositions, Sophia layers and merges numerous images to create tantalisingly real, yet imagined landscapes. A sense of hazy nostalgia is created through her careful contortion of light and shadow, adumbrating a sense of familiarity and place. Over recent years, Sophia has been exploring the intaglio process of photogravure. She says of this technique, “It is one of the earliest and most beautiful ways of transferring a photographic image to a piece of paper, via a plate and then taken through a press…I love the process of traditional printmaking and the unique qualities (particularly the velvet blacks) the prints convey.” In all of her works, Sophia’s atmospheric landscapes are deeply alluring, imbued with a sense of emotional and spiritual dimensions. As art critic, historian and curator Sasha Grishin commented of her works, “One could say that most of Szilagyi’s digital prints could be considered as self-portraits – or images of self – projected into the landscape….She appears to embrace an irrational aspect of romanticism where nature is not something that simply exists, but something that can be imagined and occupied by mysterious forces.”
Sophia Szilagyi graduated with First Class Honours from the School of Art and Culture at RMIT in 2000. Since graduating, Sophia has held a number of solo shows as well as participating in many group exhibitions across Australia. Her work has been selected in print awards including the Fremantle Print Prize (2007, the Banyule Award for Works on Paper (2011, 2009 and 2007) and most recently, St Kevins Art Prize (2018 and 2020). Sophia’s work is represented in numerous collections including Art Gallery of Western Australia, Parliament House, Burnie Regional Art Museum, La Trobe Regional Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Banyule City Art Collection, Print Council of Australia, Queensland University of Technology and the State Library of Victoria.
