LONDON.- In her first solo exhibition, 27-year-old Hungarian artist Zsofia Schweger – selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016 – is presenting work created exclusively during her six-month Griffin Art Prize residency. The Griffin Art Prize is a unique opportunity that awards recent art graduates the time and space to develop their practice through a residency above Griffin Gallery.

Zsofia’s strikingly colourful yet muted paintings sensitively portray feelings of home, belonging and identity as a Hungarian emigrant living and working in the UK. Born in 1989, the year that saw the fall of the Berlin wall, Zsofia experienced the first waves of new capitalism, and an influx of western culture in Eastern Europe. From the excitement of watching American cartoons for the first time, to the anticipation of being taken to the only Burger King in her town, Zsofia grew up in a time where hope and freedom emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Zsofia paints minimal domestic interiors of the home she grew up in Sandorfalva, Hungary, and shows the process of remembering these scenes with each touch of the artist’s hand on the canvas. While her paintings appear to be made of perfect, clean shapes in block colours, a closer look reveals the anxiety behind each brush stroke, and a sense of both comfort and alienation.

In remembering, she attempts to reconcile her fond nostalgia for her childhood with how she feels about the politics of Hungary today. The quivering outline of her painted shapes, the imperfect brushstrokes and the small gaps exposing bare canvas present a powerful tension between the familiarity of memory, and the dread and prospect of returning to a country rife with political corruption.

After studying for a year in New York when she was 16, Zsofia returned to Hungary to finish school and was determined to move abroad to continue her education. She completed a double major at Wellesley College, Massachusetts in BA Studio Art and Comparative Literature, where she was also awarded the Madeleine Albright Fellowship. She has since earned her MA Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art.