Sophia Szilagyi is a talented mid-career Australian artist. She works primarily within the contemporary realm of digital printmaking and photography, creating captivating and deeply contemplative compositions.
Szilagyi holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from RMIT (Honours), with an impressive exhibition history. Early in her career she was awarded the Banyule Award for Works on Paper and her success has grown from there. Sophia Szilagyi’s art is held in numerous private and public collections including Artbank, State Library of Victoria, Print Council of Australia, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum and Gippsland Art Gallery amongst others.
'Sophia Szilagyi creates composite images to unerring effects, making use of photographs, film stills and computer scans of paintings. Szilagyi works within the late nineteenth entry tradition of the sublime as a source of silence, stillness and mystical wonder, but imbues this with a startling sense of the spectral. Seeking out moonlit forests, lakes, rivers and oceans, Szilagyi heightens the strangeness in her scenes by laying further images over the top - but in a barely detectable way, so as to suggest a oneness in the image. Our beliefs in the photographs is challenged, but with a basis that is still empirically plausible, we can accept the occurrence of these supernatural spectacles.’
- Simon Gregg; New Romantics: Darkness and Light in Australian Art