Nostalgia: Zsofia Schweger & Nick Dawes

About

Sapar Contemporary is pleased to present Nostalgia: an exhibition of new paintings by Zsofia Schweger (Hungary/UK) and Nick Dawes (UK), and the first project of Dawes’ with the gallery. Underlying both of these two very different practices is a marked sense of nostalgia. For Schweger, this new series of work depicts an escape from the turbulence of the moment, when she left her adult home in London in the middle of the pandemic to return to her childhood home in southeast Hungary. This shift has changed Schweger’s long-established practice of basing her compositions on actual physical spaces she visited or lived in to painting from carefully constructed environments made from collected and familiar objects and furniture.  The palpable ephemera of human presence in these paintings  - the empty coffee cups, solitary dinner scene, open books - evidence a tension between something complete and something missing.  Either someone is about to enter or has just left.  Dawes’ paintings, on the other hand, begin with quotidian objects connected to signage - such as street signs that the artist encounters on his walks. The paintings are then abstracted from those objects. Dawes pushes the boundaries of painting by using industrial household paint instead of oil paint, and resisting the grid, and most importantly forgoes the brush, as his paintings are made exclusively by pouring. What is left through these actions of transformation are non-binary layered shapes and colors that approach painting from the other - more nostalgic - side. Together, these diverse works create in the viewer a simultaneously unsolicited, and yet welcome, longing for more.