Luca Sára Rózsa analyses the complex relationship between mankind and his environment. Her figures, taken from the Bible and mythology, are often shown in a natural setting in line with the representational portraiture of the Renaissance and the baroque.

Rózsa has developed a briskly intuitive painterly skill where lush brushstrokes intersect and overlap in quick succession in a palette of flesh tones, purples, greens and blues. A cyclical nature of life to be understood as a space of eternal infinity, where there is no before and after, but only a hic et nunc that does not hesitate to merge amiably with nature. 

Placed within a utopian, dreamlike landscape of solitude, her figures are forced to face their own anxieties stemming from the eternity of the world. As the artist describes it, “The figures in my paintings are mammals who have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and have been expelled from Paradise. They are fully exposed to their fate, facing it either with resignation or hope.” 

Painting does for Rózsa what religion might do for others. It enables her to find purpose for her impermanent life. Combined with her narrative and style, this understanding reinforces that a circle indeed does not have an end.

Working typically with large-scale canvases, the compositional practice of Francis Bacon and Georg Baselitz can be recognized in Rozsa’s early oil paintings – a background neutral in regard to time and space surrounds the figures, her primary subject matter.

She soon created her distinctive visual language, which boldly features gestural figurative painting’s heavy use of color, paint, and volume.

Her pictures are contemporary contemplations on the 15-17th Century religious iconography and the Representative Portraiture compositional theory. Her brushstrokes are expressive and boldly handled; she rarely uses models; therefore, her gestures are immediate translations of her ideas and subjects.

Luca Sára Rózsa (b. 1990, Hungary) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. Growing up between Brazil and Hungary, Rózsa returned to Europe to study and graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2017. In 2021, she was one of the three winners who were awarded the prestigious Esterházy Art Award. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Secrets, ABC-ARTE, Milan (2024); A Circle Doesn’t Have an End, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Down in the woods, up to the sky, Double Q Gallery, Hong Kong (2023);

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