Kristína Mésároš: Počiatok

Slovak painter Mgr. Kristína Mésároš, ArtD. lives and works in Scharndorf, Austria. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, as a scholarship holder at Lasalle College of Arts in Singapore, completed her doctoral studies at the Department of Printmaking and Other Media in the studio of prof. Vojtech Kolenčík. She is a laureate of the Martin Benka Prize 2023, in 2009 she was a finalist of the Strabag Artaward International and in 2013 and 2015 she was a finalist of the VÚB Foundation Painting of the Year Award. She has participated in several international residencies, group exhibitions and regularly exhibits individually at home and abroad. In the artist’s paintings, existential experience is revealed in the transformations of the figure and landscape. Personal experiences, fleeting situations, the perception of landscape transformations, as well as the emergence of ancient memories are connected through painting with the abstraction of feelings, moods and the search for a deeper meaning.

In the extensive exhibition Origin/Beginning, the painter Kristína Mésároš presents her work through thematic and motivic series, in which she creates environments, landscapes and situations connected with her own experience of everyday events.

Personal experiences, fleeting situations, the perception of landscape transformations, but also the surfacing of ancient memories are connected through painting with the abstraction of feelings, moods and the search for a deeper meaning beyond the froth of days. For example, the leap into the water, associated with a sudden change in the elements, is contemplated and presented in the act of painting not only as a graceful physical movement, but also as a transformative experience, a beginning. In the elementary gestures, in the transformations of the figure, its configurations and confrontations with the environment, the existential experience of the individual is reflected, which has a more general validity. The climbing wall is not only a trainer of physical movement, but it also represents a symbolic challenge to overcome obstacles in pursuit of the set goal; similarly, the figure trying to re-erect the sail on the boat is an allegory of the effort not to give up in spite of failures and not to succumb to adversity. The motifs of variations of sailing and navigation are in turn related to life’s hope and orientation. And the grid of the mosaic, the exterior lining of the walls of the house, is the essence of the artist’s childhood memories. It represents certainty, order, a stable arrangement of shapes, a remembered sense of home and an unchanging place of return in a changing world. Its variations and fragmentation visualise the disintegration of the whole picture and the gradual disappearance of memories over time. The artist’s atmospheric and imaginative landscape paintings are also metaphorical and associated with the formation of home and the search for identity. Kristýna Mésárošová’s paintings are shaped by a cyclical movement between moments of concentration, tension, performance, inhalation and subsequent relaxation, daydreaming and meditation. They express life’s quest to fill existence with meaning and joy.