Martha Szabo

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present, Martha Szabo, Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration, a presentation of 25 paintings spanning the early 1950s through early 1990s. The artworks are all easel-sized, oil on canvas, with views of the New York City skyline and architecture as observed from the rooftop and windows of the artist's mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings where she lived and worked in Manhattan throughout her career. Twenty of the paintings are installed in the gallery salon style, an intimate presentation of several thematic and aesthetic vignettes given the small size of the canvases, ranging from 6 x 4 inches up to 24 x 39 inches.

With this debut solo painting survey, the David Richard Gallery heralds its exclusive representation of a landmark artist: NYC-based artist Martha Szabo. Featuring oil on canvas abstractions spanning four decades, several art historical –isms, and a lifetime of insatiable creativity, this exhibition marks an important chapter in the history of art and our city.

These deeply personal paintings—informed by Cubism, Constructivism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and Surrealism—invite comparisons with Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Malevich and Dali. Admirably productive during her extraordinary five-decade career, working with almost tireless initiative despite lack of consistent gallery representation or exhibition deadlines, Martha Szabo painted ode after profound ode to the metropolis she adored, her sanctuary city, her final home after years of hardship, — first Nazi persecution followed by Soviet control of Hungary. Immigration to the US in 1957 enabled Szabo to experience a creative rebirth.

From her point of view atop a mid-century apartment building, Szabo recorded the architectural drama unfolding as the NYC of John V. Lindsay embarked on its golden era of energetic planning, master building, and construction. Szabo’s vantage point on tall, and ever taller, modern structures, juxtaposed with the expressive rooftops of stalwart, older walk-up buildings that withstood the built environment’s sixties-seventies seismic shift. It was balm for the artist’s spirit to observe and chronicle how natural phenomena burnished the inspiring architectural energy of her adopted imperial city with spectacular cloud formations, sunrises, sunsets, and even rainbows.

“These windowed paintings… are primarily cityscapes of imagination, a masterful record of place in lively dialogue between the external world and inward expression in front of that glass divide,” writes Gwen F. Chanzit, Curator Emerita, Denver Art Museum, in her catalogue essay.

With half a century dedicated to her meditative, evocative practice of painting New York, Szabo produced literally hundreds of paintings, in which contemporary art audiences will recognize and share, in Steinbeck’s phrase, the indescribable joy of creation.

Martha Szabo (b. 1928) immigrated to New York from her native Hungary in 1957. Having survived the Holocaust and a Nazi labor camp in Austria, she earned a master’s degree from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. The series of paintings in this presentation are of the New York City skyline as viewed from the roof top of Szabo's east side apartment building during the early 1960s through the 1990s. However, most of the works in the exhibition are from the pivotal period during the1960s through mid-1970s. She found the rooftop a liberating and transformative space where her imagination ran wild and free. Initially, she saw the elements on the roofs as blocky, geometric shapes and non-objective abstractions influenced by her Modernist training. Later, Surrealistic fantasies emerged, the chimneys and their ethereal plumes of smoke transformed into anthropomorphic forms and sinewy figures embracing and dancing together in the night skies. Szabo referred to her imaginative vignettes as the “souls of the transformed building celebrating”. For Szabo, the roof tops, specifically, and New York, in general, were a celebration of her liberation from the Holocaust and freedom to pursue her art and painting.