I am a painter, most days. My compositions layer appropriated historical photographs with decorative patterns, scrapbooking what I refer to, somewhat self-deprecatingly, as unrigorous research with domestic visual culture. This collage-like structure mirrors the scraps of women’s internal lives recorded in visual and written archives. It also reflects an understanding of history as fractured, nonlinear, and echoing.
The patterns I use are pulled from a personal archive of my own homes, Hungarian architecture and textiles, and imagery connected to the women whose stories I follow. These era-specific patterns evoke decor and design, the unseen labor of home-making. They often envelop or intrude on figures, hinting at a life that continues at home, one that never made it into the official record, one that sometimes exists within and sometimes beyond systems of state control.
Many of my paintings begin with the story of a lesser-known woman’s resistance to state abuse perpetrated through medical, judicial, or labor systems. I follow this thread outward, finding repeating patterns in seemingly disparate stories across time. I’m drawn to the friction between violence and decoration—to how injustice coexists with a nice floral print in our everyday lives and environments. I’m curious about how beauty can serve us, about the possibility that the visual joy of bright color and rhythmic pattern might allow the content to slip surreptitiously past, radicalizing the living room.
Luca Molnar (b. 1991, Budapest, Hungary) is a painter, educator, and sometimes-writer based in Central Florida. Molnar grew up mostly in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she often felt like an outsider amongst the genteel Southern suburbanites and developed an obsession with Vera Bradley floral prints rooted in equal parts revulsion and aspiration. Her first book, The Mother Game, is an experimental, collaborative artist book featuring text and images from both her and her collaborator Kat Shannon. It will be available from Burrow Press in 2026.
Other recent works include Worker Bees, a thirty-eight foot mural installed at the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, which highlights Floridian farmworkers and their advocates; The Beauty of Politics, a body of paintings developed in response to the Hand Art Center’s historic Oscar Bluemner collection and the 1913 Paterson silk strike; Painting Requests from Tomoka, an ongoing collaborative project pairing Community Education Project students incarcerated at Tomoka Correctional Institution with Stetson painting students; and Helybe, a site-specific installation that covered the gallery floor in tile in a Hungarian flame stitch pattern.
Molnar received her MFA from New York University and her BA in Studio Art from Dartmouth College. She is currently an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Stetson University.