TIBOR SIMON-MAZULA

He came to painting by an indirect route. Simon-Mazula took his BA in drawing and visual arts at the University of Szeged in 1996, then trained in animation at Pannónia Film Studio and in short film in Budapest — disciplines still legible in the measured construction of his picture plane and in a handling of light closer to the camera than to observational painting. He left Hungary in 2008, spent two years in Dubai, and moved to California, where an engagement with the Bay Area Figurative tradition led to an MFA in painting at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, in 2013. He returned to Budapest, where he lives and works. The recent paintings hold to a narrow set of motifs: a forest settled into silence, a park where an old tree stands, and his wife Diana, who has been the constant subject of the work for more than a decade. The intimacy of these subjects is kept at a distance by the process itself. The artist has said that he is not trying to restore an emotion so much as to leave the place where one passed. What results reads as a terrain of sensation — colour laid down in strata, brushwork that registers as duration — rather than a single fixed image.

Simon-Mazula was named Emerging Artist at the Academy of Art University in 2013 and exhibited at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in 2015 as part of Emerging Artists of the Bay Area. In 2018 his work was selected for the 33rd Tallahassee International at the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts. His first museum solo exhibition, Pure Beauty, opened at the Munkácsy Mihály Museum in 2019, accompanied by a monograph with texts by Hungarian and American critics, writers and musicians. He has since held solo exhibitions at Han Art Gallery, Taipei (2023) and Pintér Gallery, Budapest (2024), and has shown at ART TAIPEI. Seoul Art Now has presented his work in Korea since 2023, including the solo exhibitions Quiet Fascination, Deep Contemplation (Liszt Institute Seoul, 2024) and A Record for the Fading (Seongdong Cultural Foundation, Seoul, 2025).

Text courtesy Seoul Art Now.