Zsófia Keresztes

Budapest, 1985

Zsófia Keresztes lives and works in Budapest. She studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Keresztes creates large sculptural works and installations out of a combination of materials that straddle identities both virtual and real. These are often finished in pastel hues of light blue, beige, coral, and pink, adding to their appropriation of actual and imagined bodies. The large scale of these works belies their playful, otherworldly levity, open and porous to the spaces and viewers that surround them, linking disparate forms into precarious chains full of associative potential and structural insubordination. In recognition of her capacity to transform sites and contexts into imagined worlds of part-objects and bodily attachments, Keresztes was chosen to represent her native Hungary at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Solo exhibitions have taken place at KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, Germany (2023); Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2022); Venice Biennale (2022); Elijah Wheat Showroom, Brooklyn, New York (2020); Karlin Studios, Prague, Czech Republic (2020) among others. Her works have also been included in group exhibitions at Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2023); Umetnostna Galerija Maribor, Slovenia (2023); Centre Pompidou-Metz; the Baltic Triennial 14 (both 2022); the 34th Ljubljana Biennale (2021); 15th Lyon Biennale (2019), among others.

The Most of Us, 2023

Styrofoam, glass mosaic, grout, fiberglass, construction adhesive, 120 x 242 x 150cm, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and König Gallery.

This piece in the form of a fantastical creature with legs spread like a woman’s thighs, represents a mother breastfeeding her children. Keresztes switches the roles and changes the natural logic by putting the green apple as the mother figure and the ripe apples as the children. We are no longer sure who is feeding whom.