BALINT ZSAKO: SCULPTURE
Online Exclusive Exhibition
December 20, 2021 - January 31, 2022
Left: Balint Zsako, Built From Sticks 11 (Love), 2021, Archival ink on watercolor paper, 10 x 7 inches
Right: Balint Zsako, Built From Sticks 8, 2021, Archival ink on watercolor paper, 10 x 7 inches
Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to present Sculpture, an exhibition featuring twenty-three new works on paper by Balint Zsako.
Known for creating complex figurative compositions that are rich in psychological narratives and explore such existential themes as sexuality and race, Zsako now turns his focus to sculpture, albeit on his own terms and in his preferred medium of choice: paper.
Balint Zsako, Built From Sticks 19 (Shit Show), 2021, Archival ink on watercolor paper, 10 x 7 inches
In this exhibition, Zsako presents a variety of elaborate constructions made of meticulously rendered sticks that by means of accumulation begin to form different phrases and evoke eclectic symbols. As a group, these works mark an expansion of one of the themes introduced by Zsako in his 2019 solo exhibition with the gallery, which was entitled “Teeth Marks” and employed the language of public sculpture to ponder the fertile relationship between linguistics and visual imagery. Addressing his latest exploration, Zsako notes:
“To me, the heart of these works is the satisfying, never-ending oscillation of their elements and referents: visual art versus language; intimate versus epic; flat versus three-dimensional; linguistic representation versus pictorial representation; linguistic humor versus pictorial humor and wet ink that dries versus sticks that are bound together with string. All this happens in a single work; all the elements are dancing around each other and never fully settle.”
Balint Zsako was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1979, as the son of two artists, Anna Torma, a textile artist, and Istvan Zsako, a sculptor. After spending two years living as asylum seekers in West Germany, his family immigrated to Canada in 1989, where he later received his B.F.A. in Photography from Ryerson University in Toronto. Institutional exhibitions include The Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria. His work is featured in Sarah Polley’s film “Take This Waltz,” and appears in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2 drawing anthology (2013). He is included in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas and The Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia. He was long listed for The Sobey Award, Canada's largest art prize (2014) and is featured in Jason Schmidt's Artists 2, a photographic survey published by Steidl (2015). Zsako’s work has been featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and in The New Yorker, among others. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
