Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles is currently presenting A Circle Does Not Have An End, a solo exhibition of Budapest-based artist Luca Sára Rózsa.

The exhibition features recent paintings and ceramic relief. According to the artist, the people are living their lives in silent resignation, and they represent the eternal life cycle. The ceramic relief and one of the paintings depict a mother breastfeeding her baby alluding to the inevitable passage of life from one generation to the next.

The paintings are also very much about painting itself as Rózsa has developed a briskly intuitive painterly skill where lush brush strokes intersect and overlap in quick succession in a palette of flesh tones, purples, greens and blues.

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.

Born in Budapest in 1990, Luca Sára Rózsa grew up between Brazil and Hungary. She returned to Europe to study at Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary (2009-2012); Universitate di Arta si Design, Cluj Napoca, Romania (2011); Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest (2012-2017) and Jan Matejko University of Fine Arts,  Krakow (2015). She has had eleven solo exhibitions in Hungary since 2011, most recently at Viltin Gallery, Budapest (2021). This is her first exhibition at Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

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