ARTIST TALK: Saturday, March 4, 2:30 PM

Brigitta Kocsis’ paintings blend realism, illustration and expressive painterly gestures in a chaotic and visually charged landscape. Her current series, Contingent Bodies, focuses on the representation of bodies in transformation – both organic and unfamiliar. The painting’s surface is used to transform energies and refabricate the body with suggestions of contamination, connectivity and displacement, reflecting Kocsis’ cultural history as a Hungarian, Romany and Canadian. Fragmented bodies emerge in the play between abstraction and figuration, embedded in perpetual rootlessness, containing exile and otherness within themselves. These polymorphic figures confront sexual and cultural categorization, recasting the body as part imaginary and part construct. Exploring notions of the cyborg and the prosthetic, these figures exist between the human and post-human, biotechnological and sexualized bodies, and the fashion industry and anime.

Brigitta Kocsis was born in Sarospatak, Hungary, to a Hungarian father and a Romani mother. Kocsis works in multimedia installation, video and painting, which integrates abstract and figurative elements. Her work has been included in group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Geneva Art Biennale; the Balassi Institute, Finland; Szeged University, Hungary; Harcourt House, Canada; Okotoks Art Gallery, Canada; and the Burnaby Art Gallery, Canada. She studied drawing at the Studio For Young Artists (Fiatal Muveszek Klubja-FMK), attended the Marczibanyi-teri kor (Marczibanyi Education Center) in Budapest as well as Concordia University in Montreal. She received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2005. Kocsis lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

PUBLICATION
Download the exhibition handout with an essay by Clint Burnham here.

Funding for this project was received by the Hamber Foundation.

Image: BK12, 2015, acrylic on canvas.