Nostalgia: Zsofia Schweger & Nick Dawes

Text by Emma Saperstein Chief Curator at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art

September 9, 2022 - October 16, 2022

 Opening reception on September 9, 6-8 pm

 Sapar Contemporary is pleased to present Nostalgia: an exhibition of new paintings by Zsofia Schweger (Hungary/UK) and Nick Dawes (UK), and the first project of Dawes’ with the gallery. Underlying both of these two very different practices is a marked sense of nostalgia. For Schweger, this new series of work depicts an escape from the turbulence of the moment, when she left her adult home in London in the middle of the pandemic to return to her childhood home in southeast Hungary. This shift has changed Schweger’s long-established practice of basing her compositions on actual physical spaces she visited or lived in to painting from carefully constructed environments made from collected and familiar objects and furniture.  The palpable ephemera of human presence in these paintings  - the empty coffee cups, solitary dinner scene, open books - evidence a tension between something complete and something missing.  Either someone is about to enter or has just left.  Dawes’ paintings, on the other hand, begin with quotidian objects connected to signage - such as street signs that the artist encounters on his walks. The paintings are then abstracted from those objects. Dawes pushes the boundaries of painting by using industrial household paint instead of oil paint, and resisting the grid, and most importantly forgoes the brush, as his paintings are made exclusively by pouring. What is left through these actions of transformation are non-binary layered shapes and colors that approach painting from the other - more nostalgic - side. Together, these diverse works create in the viewer a simultaneously unsolicited, and yet welcome, longing for more. 

Dawes combines his interests in High Modernism and 1950s abstract painting in this new series of work. Building on these references, and using an expanded version of watercolor painting, Dawes builds the forms in his work through a series of poured layers that penetrate, diffuse, and run - generating a translucent visual dynamic where solid components dissolve and flow into a vocabulary of fluid entities. Once he has an idea of where the work begins, he starts with small sketches and drawings based on a single word - and as he begins his process the work goes on a journey of transformation, where the starting point of the work and where it ends up are almost unrecognizable. Using the scale of his body, and the canvas itself as a tool, Dawes shapes the forms on his canvases into dynamic and mysterious shapes that seem to surround and encompass the viewer. In this new series, Dawes challenges himself formally - introducing a new, Baroque-influenced color palette, and keeping the paint application a bit thinner - maintaining the idea of transparency at the forefront of the work. Dawes considers his practice just one large body of work - each piece building on its predecessor, adding something new or taking something away, and offering new sensibilities of experimentation with each new painting.  In works like Level, leaning on the legacies of post-war abstract expressionist painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, Dawes welcomes a relaxed playfulness as the shapes dynamically move towards each other and towards us. 

Zsofia Schweger’s works presented here are some of the most detailed and narrative of her work to date. For Schweger, the temporary transition of her practice from a London-based studio to a hybrid-domestic space in Hungary marked a distinct shift in her painterly approach. Rather than leaving the marks on her canvases up to chance, Schweger exercises total control over her depicted environments. Working from these new fabricated scenes, for the first time in her practice Schweger is able to physically, in real time, inhabit and interact with the contexts she depicts. Formally, her paintings invite us in using the diagonals of one-point perspective and a very carefully constructed color scheme. There is inherent contradiction in our lived experience of this new body of work, absence and presence, stillness and movement, expansive space and stark flatness, deep feeling and clear apathy, a warm coziness and ominous dread, all elements of both the private and the social. In her large triptych, Schweger takes on a formal challenge of combining three canvases to create one long composition - one that can be rearranged in any combination, or the paintings can be hung separately, on their own. In her largest work of the show, Be Right Back (Feeding the Dogs, Perhaps), Schweger challenges our sense of scale - grossly exaggerating the size of domestic objects - a chair, cup of coffee, open book - to explore how this will feel for the viewer - a sense of domination, of comedy, or immersion. 

In their varied investigations of human presence, Schweger and Dawes invite viewers to think about their own autonomy and lived histories, as well as their relationships to everyday spaces, shapes and objects.

Zsofia Schweger (Hungary/UK) is a Hungarian artist based in London. Zsofia had lived in the US for 5 years and studied at Wellesley College, before she moved to London in 2013. She then attended the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating with an MA in Painting in 2015. Zsofia’s work in painting is informed by her experience of moving countries: she is interested in human relationships to spaces in general and the notions of home and belonging in particular. In her paintings of domestic and public interiors, Zsofia uses reductive paint application, flat panels of color and a muted palette in order to express a sense of both alienation and comfort. Zsofia was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016 and has been supported by several generous prizes, including the Jealous Prize, Griffin Art Prize, the Alice C. Cole Award, and the FBA Futures ‘One To Watch’ Award. Since her first solo exhibition at Griffin Gallery in London in 2016, she has had solo shows at Edel Assanti (London), Sapar Contemporary (New York), Lundgren Gallery (Palma de Mallorca), Inda Gallery (Budapest), Rutger Brandt Gallery (Amsterdam). In Summer 2022, she had her first institutional solo show at the regional Romer Floris Museum in Hungary. 

Nick Dawes (UK): After completing the Foundation course at Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology Nick Dawes graduated with his BA in Fine Art from Brighton Polytechnic in 1992. Nominated for the Celeste Art Prize in 2006, Dawes’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in the UK and Europe, including Cell Project Space in London, Galerie Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne, Switzerland, the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, 68projects in Berlin, and recently Expo Chicago in the US. His works are included in collections in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Spain and the US. Nick Dawes lives and works in London. Dawes’ unique panting technique has been refined over many years. Color and text appropriated from the Highway Code relocate within the language of high Modernist Abstraction. He begins with sampling a single word as a starting point. The poured lines of paint (brush is never used) specifically relate to the formal values of each letter. Using an expanded version of watercolor painting, form is built up in a series of poured layers that penetrate, diffuse and run, generating a translucent visual dynamic where solid components dissolve and flow into a vocabulary of fluid entities. Displacing the the purity of the color-field painting, multiple narratives reveal within a loose-fitting organic syntax. The artist refers to the reality of today’s world where words and images are constantly in transit, explores the allegiance between pure fact and its displacement, collapsing the relationship between image and text, while simultaneously enabling content and the historical languages of the medium to inventively reconfigure.

Emma Saperstein is a curator based in San Luis Obispo, CA. She currently serves as the Chief Curator and Director of Education at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. As part of her role, she manages the commissioning of all public art projects for the City of San Luis Obispo. From 2016-2020 she worked as both the Global Portal Curator for Shared_Studios and managed complex dialogue-based programming projects with the UN, BBC, the Obama Foundation, WGBH and more, and as the Curator of the Harold J Miossi Art Gallery at Cuesta College. She has guest juried exhibitions and public arts projects in California and beyond. Emma holds a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership from California Polytechnic University and a Master’s Degree in Curating from the University of Aarhus in Denmark.