Sapar Contemporary is pleased to present Nostalgia: an exhibition of new paintings by Zsofia Schweger and Nick Dawes, and the first project of Dawes’ with the gallery. Underlying both of these two very different practices is a marked sense of nostalgia. For Schweger, this new series of work depicts an escape from the turbulence of the moment, when she left her adult home in London in the middle of the pandemic to return to her childhood home in southeast Hungary. This shift has changed Schweger’s long-established practice of basing her compositions on actual physical spaces she visited or lived in to painting from carefully constructed environments made from collected and familiar objects and furniture. The palpable ephemera of human presence in these paintings – the empty coffee cups, solitary dinner scene, open books – evidence a tension between something complete and something missing…
Dawes combines his interests in High Modernism and 1950s abstract painting in this new series of work. Building on these references, and using an expanded version of watercolor painting, Dawes builds the forms in his work through a series of poured layers that penetrate, diffuse, and run – generating a translucent visual dynamic where solid components dissolve and flow into a vocabulary of fluid entities. Once he has an idea of where the work begins, he starts with small sketches and drawings based on a single word – and as he begins his process the work goes on a journey of transformation, where the starting point of the work and where it ends up are almost unrecognizable. Using the scale of his body, and the canvas itself as a tool, Dawes shapes the forms on his canvases into dynamic and mysterious shapes that seem to surround and encompass the viewer…
