Zsófia Keresztes (b. 1985) is a Budapest-based artist whose large-scale sculptural works and installations – a combination of materials, especially marble – straddle identities both virtual and real. Colourful, often finished in pastel hues of light blue, beige, coral, and pink, adding to their appropriation of actual and imagined bodies, Keresztes’s art creates its own world. The large scale belies the works’ playful, otherworldly levity, open and porous to the spaces and viewers around them, linking disparate forms into precarious chains full of associative potential and structural insubordination.
It was her parents who planted an appreciation for art in her mind. With her mum working on applied photography and her dad’s family being in the florist trade and him choosing antiques, Zsófia grew up surrounded by various objects and artworks, making her interest in such a life path somehow natural and enthusiastically supported by her family. She studied ceramics in high school but graduated as a painter from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. As she longed to return to the known forms during her first years at university, she gradually opened her creative process for such experiments while changing her view of the form – from a purely practical design approach to being “drawn to works that enter our living spaces and have a more significant presence”.
After graduation, Zsófia experimented with the formability of paper, and her “installations were mostly ephemeral”. But it was 2016 that brought a change into her art, establishing the artist as a shining light within the Hungarian art scene. Having worked with textiles before and searching for a new material to cover her sculptures, Keresztes found the polystyrene material that eventually became the basic material of her art, along with the glass mosaic forming their shell structure. “During this period, a more abstract, amorphous formal language became characteristic of my work; it gave a form to the stations of shaping personality and of the experiences that would influence them”, she says.
Drawing inspiration from the glistening surfaces of human inner organs to convey a boundaryless fluidity, the artist incorporates glass mosaics into her anthropomorphic sculptures, finding them to be the ideal medium for evoking both flesh and surreal identities. Zsófia keeps returning to the idea of organic forms as to an illusion of spontaneity while simultaneously being a message of a system already encoded in them. “Many times I feel that these proliferating bodies look as if they were growing on their own, as if there was some pre-ordered secret form in these materials, and I adapt to that”.
Drawing inspiration from the glistening surfaces of human inner organs to convey a boundaryless fluidity, the artist incorporates glass mosaics into her anthropomorphic sculptures, finding them to be the ideal medium for evoking both flesh and surreal identities.
As such, with the use of soft pastel tones – shades of peach, rosé, turquoise, and light green – that creates a deceptive sense of cheerfulness juxtaposed with unsettling undertones, the artist has developed a unique visual language of both vulnerability and vigorousness. Through this interplay, Keresztes masterfully balances contrasts, merging beauty with the grotesque. “To me, these statues are like 21st-century totems, but are much more human, more fallible than the once inaccessible, unearthly creatures”. Her sculptures embody then both pleasure and discomfort, strength and fragility, full of associations with mythology, philosophy, and art history.
What excites Zsófia about mosaics is how, with the grid of lines drawn by tiny pieces placed next to each other, the tensions and dualities occupying her mind can be displayed within the strict symmetry. She sees glass mosaics as a way to communicate with the viewer through the light shimmering on and bouncing off the glass sheets. But with precision always constituting a problem for the artist, she appreciates the material with its logical system. “Like an infinite number of small information panels lined up on top of each other on the sculptures, and depending on which one gets a little light, it shows its shape and even sets the form in motion”, she says in one of the interviews. “In these intermingles, I can identify some analogies between the structure of our personality and our human relationships”.
What excites Zsófia about mosaics is how, with the grid of lines drawn by tiny pieces placed next to each other, the tensions and dualities occupying her mind can be displayed within the strict symmetry.
In recognition of her capacity to transform sites and contexts into imagined worlds of part-objects and bodily attachments, Keresztes was chosen to represent Hungary at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Her After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage opened new dimensions of reflections upon identity to the audiences. The large entrancing sculptures and the exhibition’s concept in general referenced Arthur Schopenhauer’s porcupine dilemma. The philosopher described a situation in which hedgehogs, seeking warmth in extreme cold, try to huddle together but inevitably prick each other with their spines. Similarly, we long for human connection, yet true intimacy is impossible without causing mutual harm – ultimately straining our relationships with others. Just like that, Keresztes’s sculptures delved into one of the most debated metaphors of philosophy – flawlessly even, with the ensemble awakening in the viewers a need to hug them with awareness of the harm.
In her more recent work, Zsófia switched to apples, showing them in various states of metamorphosis, associating cultural-historical aspects with the fruit. In her solo exhibition, In Ethylene Arms, the symbol of the apple in eight whimsical large-scale mosaic sculptures is to present a garden of delights. Yet, for the artist, the apple symbolises femininity, motherhood, and maturity, reflecting the quest for balance between self-identity and relationships with others throughout the journey of growing up. For instance, The Guardian (2023), a monumental glass mosaic sculpture depicting Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, as a two-faced apple symbolises temptation and desire. Just like that, Keresztes draws us into a mysterious garden where fantastical beings, merging plant and animal traits, take on symmetrical, intimate postures with hybrid forms dissolving the lines between the natural and the cultural, the animalistic and the botanical.
The vulnerability in her works is evident. Like with a self-destructive sphinx adorned with drops of failure as jewellery, or a figure that clings to its wounds, leaning against a wall and creating its own prison. That is why Zsófia herself describes her deeply resonating art as “connection-seeking formations”.
Being a Hungarian University of Fine Arts graduate, and having received deserved recognition with and for her Venice Biennale exhibition, some of the spaces her other exhibitions have also taken place include: Liberec Museum of Fine Arts, Liberec (2025); Nevven Gallery, Gothenburg, Sweden (2024); acb Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, (2023); König Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2023); Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2022); Elijah Wheat Showroom, Brooklyn, New York (2020); Karlin Studios, Prague, Czech Republic (2020). Her works have also been included in group exhibitions at Fondation Opale, Lens, Switzerland (2025); Fondation Villa Datris, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France, (2024); Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2023); Centre Pompidou-Metz; the Baltic Triennial 14 (both 2022); the 34th Ljubljana Biennale (2021); 15th Lyon Biennale (2019), among others.
