Artist Statement
Fed by a memory bank of people and places from both a subconscious realm and lived experience, Szonja Vucsetics’ work reflects on the physical and spiritual relationship between humans and the natural world. Through expressively painted landscapes and colourful paper collages which metaphorically illustrate her life story around childhood migration, Szonja’s work is often autobiographical and focuses on nature, soil, and water as the places that contain stories. She contemplates the contrast of nature and an urbanized environment in the context of cyclical impermanence and continuity, destruction and construction, growth and decay, life and death.
Artist Bio
Szonja Vucsetics is a Hungarian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, working primarily in oil paint and mixed media on paper. She earned her BFA in drawing and painting from OCAD University in 2007 and has lived and worked in Hungary, Jamaica, and Canada. She has exhibited in Hungary and Canada, and her work is held in private collections locally and internationally. Szonja’s works are illustrative and speak the visual language of stories and dreams, playfully blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, impression and expression, representation and abstraction. Through material explorations with brushwork and colour, and found materials such as recycled paper and wood, her work often focuses on our relationship to land and water as places that holds our stories.
