Victoria Szilagyi is a Chicago based visual artist and performer. The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Szilagyi descends from a family of traditional Hungarian artisan woodworkers and musicians. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with an emphasis on painting and drawing, and has exhibited in various shows locally, nationally and internationally.
In her work, Szilagyi references her background of live performance to explore a fascination with the personas individuals create, both soley for the benefit of our own self image and the benefit of others within society as a whole.
Citing various sources rife with “characters,” -film, theatre, the internet, as well as any popular media, Szilagyi formulates theatrical constructs vacillating between high brow and low brow, traditional figurative painting, kitsch, camp and painterly abstraction. Using performers in costume as her primary models, who’s portrayals essentially represent exaggerated, hyper-characterized features of human nature, Szilagyi employs Werner Herzog’s theory (originally regarding cinema verite, but here applied to painting) that truth can only be reached through fabrication, imagination and stylization.