VAJDA LIVIA - SOLO ART EXHIBITION
And hope became faith!
The Symbolic System of Lívia Vajda
Chamber Exhibition, Q2 2025,
Avenue Michel-Ange 10,
1000 Brussels
23 May - 15 Jun
Lívia Vajda, a French painter of Hungarian origin, belongs to the family of 20th century artists who saw and suffered all the horrors of the Second World War.
A few names, without claiming completeness:
Zoran Music (1909-2005), born in Slovenia, was arrested by the Nazis for his participation in the resistance and deported to Dachau. He secretly drew the exhausted people, the piled-up corpses and the daily hardships of the camp and continued to do so even after his liberation.
During his stay in Paris in the 1950s, he was influenced by French lyrical abstraction which led him to choose abstraction over figuration - but the past never ceased to haunt him.
Sam Safran (1934-1919), a French painter of Polish origin who lost most of his family and never included human figures in his work. The tragedies that befell him have left an indelible mark on him. He composed his watercolours and gouaches from paintings of workshops, spiral staircases transformed into a labyrinth, spaces covered with vegetation
And finally - perhaps the closest to Lívia Vajda's work - Raya Sorkine (1936-2022), the Russian-born painter who went into hiding during the war. In their lives they both made a conscious and stubborn effort to see and show the good side of existence. The vibrant colours and subjects of their paintings perfectly reflect this philosophy of life. Painting was a therapy for them to get rid of nightmarish thoughts, although they never managed to erase them completely and permanently.
"If I am able to live a normal life today, it is thanks to painting - it freed me," Vajda said during an interview in his home in 2005.
Lívia Vajda claimed to belong to the second Parisian school. The Second Ecole de Paris was founded in the early 1940s and crystallised after the war. This new Ecole de Paris was much more diverse than its predecessor, embracing both figurative art and various forms of abstraction. New salons were set up, grouping artists according to their tendencies, and exhibitions proliferated.
Lívia Vajda was captivated by this fresh, dynamic atmosphere, fascinated by the bustle of the heterogeneous art scene, the renewal and diversity of painting. His observations and his encounters with painters, sculptors, writers and poets had a major impact on his work.
Infused with the colours, shapes and painting styles of the time, he developed his own style. Vieira da Silva, Árpád Szenes, Maurice Estève, Serge Poliakoff, Jean-Michel Atlan, Karel Appel and Edouard Pignon are just a few of the artists of the New School in Paris whose work was particularly attractive to Lívia Vajda.
Since Lívia Vajda has not dated either her drawings or her paintings, it is difficult to place them in time. They can be classified according to the place where they were created, distinguishing between her Parisian and her Brussels period. But her unmistakable style and means of expression remain unchanged.
based on an article by art historian Júlia Cserba