Brigitta Kocsis - Contingent Bodies

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Brigitta Kocsis, “BK0215,” 2017

acrylic on canvas

Brigitta’s work explores the space between representation and abstraction. Within this creative process, she unfolds the implications of structural and theoretical formations. It is a chaotic and visually charged deconstruction between figurative and abstract art where various styles collide and create newfound relationships. The tension between styles and subject matter converge as an existential landscape.

In her current work, Brigitta focuses on the representation of the body undergoing transformation, abandoning formal purity and desiring disengagement from the human condition due to contemporary digital technologies and hopelessness. As a social construct the body is perception: male/female, natural/unnatural, self/other, live/dead increasingly shift. This series portrays something organic and unfamiliar. It stylistically blends realism, illustration and expressive painterly gestures, using the medium as a means to engage with imagination. The painting surface is used for transforming energies and refabricating the body with suggestions of contamination of connectivity and displacement, reflecting the artist’s own personal cultural history as a Hungarian/Romany/Canadian. Tainting the paintings with her own foreignness, the paintings are imbedded in perpetual rootlessness, as the figures contain exile and otherness within themselves. Through various formal elements, these polymorphic figures are created to confront sexual and cultural categories and are recasting the body as part imaginary and part construct. Exploring notions of the cyborg and the prosthetic, these figures will stand between human and post-human, and will exist between a biotechnological medical body and the sexualized body, the fashion industry and anime.

Brigitta Kocsis was born in Hungary. In 1988 she moved to the UK where she learned English in Brixton and after two years there, relocated to Montreal in 1990 to pursue her education at Concordia University Fine Arts. She received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2005 and has dedicated herself to painting. For the last five years, she has travelled abroad and exhibited internationally. Her paintings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada as well as in Switzerland, Hungary, and Finland. She is a recipient of a Canada Council Assistance to Visual Artists - Project Grant in 2010 and spent 5 months researching and creating in Paris and Berlin. She also received a Canada Council Travel Grant and she mounted her first European solo show in Geneva, Switzerland for the Geneva Art Biennale. Her 2014/15-exhibition calendar included two solo exhibitions in Alberta, Canada with assistance from the BC Arts Council, as well as solo exhibitions in Hungary and Finland with the support of the Canada Arts Council.