I am a painter, most days. My compositions layer appropriated historical photographs with patterns, scrapbooking domestic visual culture with what I refer to, somewhat self-deprecatingly, as unrigorous research. This collage-like structure mirrors the scraps of women’s internal lives recorded in visual and written archives. It also reflects an intersectional way of understanding the past: 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 retro, worn 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 perpetuated through medical, judicial, and 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.
Molnar (b. 1991, Budapest, Hungary) received her MFA from New York University and her BA in Studio Art from Dartmouth College. Recent exhibitions include The Beauty of Politics: Oscar Bluemner and Luca Molnar at the Hand Art Center (DeLand, FL); Helybe at alt_space Gallery (New Smyrna Beach, FL); and Same Source at Art Center Sarasota (FL). She is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
Photograph by Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss