Torma and Zsako Family
Artist Statement
Anna Torma, Istvan Zsako, David Zsako and Balint Zsako
When everyone in the family is an artist.
Our family has four members, and all of us are artists.
Anna Torma, my mother, uses silk and fabric to make wonderfully complicated works that are part drawing, part collage and part textile art. Her works are made using traditional hand embroidery combined with the use of found fabrics. She has also saved every childhood drawing my brother and I have ever made and doesn’t hesitate to transposes these to her medium to further a narrative or conceptual idea.
My father Istvan is a sculptor and painter. For a long time he has made bronze sculptures of warriors, birds and goddesses, but recently his attention has shifted to exploring the medium of painting. We immigrated to North America in 1989 and learning English has been a long and often comical process for him. In his new paintings he tries to sort out the relationships between image and word and all of the alchemical absurdist logic one finds in a new language.
My younger brother David makes meticulous pen and ink drawings that are a combination of the photorealistic and the baroque. He takes sensational images and through an intense stylization process translates photographic spectacle into near abstraction.
I graduated with a fine art degree from university after studying photography for four years. Now, while I still feel love for that medium and regularly make and show photographs, my attention has mostly shifted to small-scale watercolor drawings. In these works I start with a figure and invent the narrative story as I go along by adding various elements and additional characters. I rarely know what path a drawing is going to follow until it is actually completed. And even after I am finished the stories change; the work always remains uncontrollably open to the individual interpretation of each viewer.
All four of us create characters that illustrate tales of archetypal experience. Sex, mythology, family, bodily functions and primitive narratives are themes that animate our works. We don’t discuss art very much but we always want to see what the others are doing. Its in the family air, it’s a feeling, not concrete but strongly felt. Our artistic relationship is an intangible connection of shared aesthetics and experiences that is always in the background and directs our hands no matter how far we may be from each other.
Balint Zsako
When everyone in the family is an artist.
Our family has four members, and all of us are artists.
Anna Torma, my mother, uses silk and fabric to make wonderfully complicated works that are part drawing, part collage and part textile art. Her works are made using traditional hand embroidery combined with the use of found fabrics. She has also saved every childhood drawing my brother and I have ever made and doesn’t hesitate to transposes these to her medium to further a narrative or conceptual idea.
My father Istvan is a sculptor and painter. For a long time he has made bronze sculptures of warriors, birds and goddesses, but recently his attention has shifted to exploring the medium of painting. We immigrated to North America in 1989 and learning English has been a long and often comical process for him. In his new paintings he tries to sort out the relationships between image and word and all of the alchemical absurdist logic one finds in a new language.
My younger brother David makes meticulous pen and ink drawings that are a combination of the photorealistic and the baroque. He takes sensational images and through an intense stylization process translates photographic spectacle into near abstraction.
I graduated with a fine art degree from university after studying photography for four years. Now, while I still feel love for that medium and regularly make and show photographs, my attention has mostly shifted to small-scale watercolor drawings. In these works I start with a figure and invent the narrative story as I go along by adding various elements and additional characters. I rarely know what path a drawing is going to follow until it is actually completed. And even after I am finished the stories change; the work always remains uncontrollably open to the individual interpretation of each viewer.
All four of us create characters that illustrate tales of archetypal experience. Sex, mythology, family, bodily functions and primitive narratives are themes that animate our works. We don’t discuss art very much but we always want to see what the others are doing. Its in the family air, it’s a feeling, not concrete but strongly felt. Our artistic relationship is an intangible connection of shared aesthetics and experiences that is always in the background and directs our hands no matter how far we may be from each other.
Balint Zsako
Press
1 July 2008 - Keeping it in the Family (NY ARTS)
Click here to download NY Arts - Keeping it in the Family.pdf
28 July 2008 - The Teacher (Fiction: The New Yorker)
Click here to download The Teacher_ Fiction_ The New Yorker.pdf