BIO

Hungarian artist Júlia Végh was born in 1990 in Budapest, Hungary, and graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (MKE) in 2016. During her degree, she studied abroad in Spain at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV).

Art prizes Végh has won include ‘The Universal Sea – Pure or Plastic?‘ Art Prize (2018), initiated by the Institute for Art and Innovation (Berlin, Germany); the ESSL Art Award CEE (2015); and she was also awarded the Art Prize of the Barcsay Jenő Foundation of
Fine Art (2014) and the prestigious scholarship of the Barcsay Award (2012).

Végh’s artwork has been selected to be included in various collections, including the Hamu és Gyémánt Collection (2018), Kepesita Art Collection (2015), the Imago Mundi Collection by Luciano Benetton (Italy, 2015) and the prestigious art collections of both Unicredit Bank (2014) and OTP Bank (2013).

Group exhibitions include those organized by ESSL Museum (Klosterneuburg), Rochester Contemporary Art Center (New York), Whiteconcept Gallery (Berlin), Brody Studios (London) and Art Market Budapest (Budapest). Júlia lives and works in Budapest.

 

STATMENT

My latest series ‘SACRAL SPACES’ presents a deeply intuitive painting language, based on the collage technique, which concentrates on the revelation of my inner, psychological, dream-like visions. The aim is to create a world of painterly theme with an intense language of its own; internal landscapes unfold before us in a dream-like, floating, idiosyncratic world. The pastose surface treatment is combined with harmonious colours. The compositions of the paintings I imagine are revealed through free, instinctive gestures; in such a way that the image almost creates itself.

Following the philosophy of L’art pour l’art, the painting’s existence is justified by its own aesthetic beauty and is independent of any social conventions. This is how I rediscover my own inner world. Through the medium of collage via oil technique, I play with the clichéd motifs of fashion magazine beauty ideals: to expose and to cover, while simultaneously revealing and highlighting at once. Through my paintings, the visual experience of random, abstract layers coming to life is brought to the surface; in this way, by turning inwards, I reveal and cast into visual form all that appears in my dreams. In contrast to my earlier figurative paintings, I now approach the subject at hand from the perspective of abstract painting.

Unlike my initial, realism paintings and series, the former outward looking stance is now suddenly replaced by a focus on the inner world, which is built from a dream world. In my new paintings, change and the element of randomness appears, as well as the human body, and the subjective inner relationship with nature and the importance of its closeness. We can also encounter visual motifs of space and non-space, and the sacred and the profane, in contrasting conceptual pairs.