Witch-hunt Painting

Jarosz Laszlo received her BA (hons) Fine Art from CSM and her MFA from Konstfack. BP Portrait Award (2006), The Columbia Threadneedle Prize (2010), Celeste Prize (2010) finalist. One of 150 long-listed for I Am Solitary - London, Beers.Lambert contemporary 2011. She received The Special Prize Art Gallery at Arte Laguna Prize (2013). Awarded with a Working Grant from The Swedish Arts Grants Committee in 2010 and Webers/Ribbing/Beskow Grant from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2016. In her on-going conceptual series “Negotiating authenticity. In search of an ideal“ Jarosz Laszlo uses painting to explore the perspectives, circumstances and philosophical undertones of the specific location and tradition. She examines our need for myths by creating historical hybrids within her works. Legends and facts are mixed up; we can no longer separate them. We lack the knowledge, which we have lost. History is not static or complete. How can we be sure that it is genuine? And how can we measure it? We repeat it and take it for granted. We take over the customs, practices, and traditions from the past generations and allow them to live on in our culture. But who owns tradition and who interprets it? Tradition, folk stories or history can be defined as tacit knowledge. How can we translate them? Tradition is ambiguous and essential to the cultural identity; it is also politically charged, and is used to enhance local and national identity. Jarosz Laszlos research is informed from a varied array of resources, from collecting folk stories, copying facts from history books and interior design magazines. The starting point is always in the modern story or the place she visits. But it´s impossible to represent all voices, and she also faces a choice. Therefore, transparency is an important technique in her work combined with graphite, painting in oil and acrylic. Her paintings are filled with layers of these quiet tenants. She is re-telling stories we forgot or never heard before, to thereby be able to see them from a different perspective, linked to the present events.