Nikolett Balázs (b. 1990) is a Budapest based artist who graduated from the Painting Department from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2015. She creates objects that redefine classic artistic techniques and materials of our environment. She is a member of MŰTŐ collective since 2016 and internationally active artist. She is a winner of the Secondary Archive competition from the Hungarian young art scene section. Her works can be found also in public (MODEM Modern and Contemporary Arts Centre) and private collections (Irokéz Collection). Balázs currently working in Austria at the AIR – Artist in Residency programme. Her works often originated from peripheral environments, she drags her found objects and poor materials from their milieu, and by recycling them she puts them in an artwork position, questioning their values and interpretation.
Balázs folds, cuts, untwists, guts, sews, glues, forms, paints and constantly searches for new contexts of the materials. The playful, sensual, social and feminin natures of fine art are essential elements of Balázs’s art, which become more human on the borderline of abstraction and figurality. As digitalization becomes widespread, our relationship with materials, our own physicality and the manual treatment of materials are becoming a more and more important topic. This elementary experience pulsates in Balázs’s work, embedded in the story of our own age and personal mythologies.