About
Artist Statement
Making art is one way I celebrate the generosity of the senses. I work from a love of form, texture and depth. I move intuitively from spontaneous expression, full of the unexpected, to a measured extraction of order from chaos. My graphite paintings and works on paper explore the subtleties that emerge from interactions of multiple layers and surfaces that constantly morph and surprise with the changing light. They are an invitation to slow down and experience the work over time.
Bio
Victoria Laszlo grew up in Beverly Hills, California, in a house filled with artistic energy. Her father was a Hungarian playwright and Hollywood screenwriter. Her mother was a vaudevillian dancer turned fashion designer whose work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Laszlo studied at the Art Center School and Chouinard Art Institute which, soon after she attended, became part of Cal Arts. This was a time when the exuberance of the Los Angeles art scene was exploding with radical innovation by L.A. based artists including James Turrell, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Kenneth Price, John Altoon and Ed Ruscha. The Fetish Finish and Light and Space movements of that time influenced Laszlo’s early work.
In the mid 1960s, Laszlo closed her studio and set off on a journey of exploration. She lived and worked in New York City, marched in Washington, and traveled throughout Mexico, Canada and the United States. In 1969, she became a founding member of a commune in the mountains of southern Colorado. Along with like-minded groups who lived in a small cluster of communities, she explored alternative ways of living. In 1976 Laszlo moved to Santa Fe. And like so many other visual artists, she took to the magical light and high-desert terrain of northern New Mexico.
At that time Laszlo began a highly successful restoration business. For almost thirty years she did work for prestigious galleries and private collectors from coast to coast. She restored Native American pottery, including prehistoric, historic and contemporary masters like Maria Martinez and Margaret Tafoya. Concurrently she continued to do her own work, even embedding tiny abstract paintings in the patina of some of the pots that she restored.
During this period Laszlo worked on unconventional surfaces, some scavenged from the Los Alamos National Labs, which included Lucite panels and large sheets of exposed film. She exhibited in Santa Fe’s seminal Armory Show and with Santa Fe galleries, as her work also made its way into corporate and private collections in Denver, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, and Santa Fe.
Laszlo enjoyed a one-woman show at the Linda Durham Gallery in 2010, exhibited in a group show at Phil Space Gallery in 2010, and in 2011 she was included in the juried show Women Artists of New Mexico. In 2014, she was part of The Armory Show at the Center for Contemporary Arts.