TERÜLŐK - Szabó Eszter kiállításának megnyitója

Szabó Eszter: Terülők

(installation, 5 oil paintings on polyester, with sound; 2026)

This site-specific installation, consisting of sound and oil paintings measuring 2 × 3 meters each, was created specifically for the forecourt of the House of Music Hungary. The figures painted on the translucent material exist in a free space and time that prescribes no particular activity—much like the visitors arriving for events. The audience occupying the space through lingering, sitting, and conversation becomes the background of the images, while the curtain blurs the boundary between reality and image.

The elderly figures depicted in the series dismantle a classical antique sculpture and the cultural tradition associated with it, appropriating it with their aged bodies, provocative and unabashed postures, and through the (re)arrangement of the sculpture’s elements. The portrayal of the elderly women engaged in reclining—or in preparing to recline—is deliberately stripped of the essentialized notions commonly attached to “old age” and “femininity.”