About Love

‘Ascetic Life.’ ‘The Obscene Feature of Love.’ ‘Praise for Tears.’ Just a few chapters title from the book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, which describes in lexical form the full range of emotions in human relationships, from encounters to expectations beyond the phases of love. In life, there are those who experience all of these emotions within a lifelong love, while others experience them in many different relationships over shorter or longer periods.

Photographers Maria do Mar Rêgo and Lilla Szász met in Lisbon in 2018, where they soon discovered that they were exploring issues of the same diverse and inexhaustible subject in their series: love. The two series form two different perspectives. Maria do Mar Rêgo has been recording the development of her relationship for almost ten years. “This series started in 2011. Its beginning coincides with my installation in Berlin, motivated by a “transformative” encounter in my life. From that moment on, I never stopped trying to transcribe the emotions aroused by this love encounter. This is a praise of love, a principle that must inspire the destiny of men. The photographs that make up this set are observations of the relationships between bodies and gestures, attitudes, mannerisms, antics, expressive movements of love. An observation of day-to-day life, in which our own feeling is contagious.” – Maria writes about her series Love is not blind (2011-2014).

Lilla Szász followed the love stories of her friends between 2009-2018. „I collect relationships. I photograph friends, family, loves, strangers. My aim is and has been, to understand what love is. What unites people? After 9 years of work, I understand that there is no single answer. The answer is that I still don't know and I don't think I'll ever know. The project is as dispersed and varied as loves and relationships can be. None is like another; none is even alike. However, there are some similarities between our loves. These photographs are part of my diary and their connection is the many forms of the same feeling that unites us.” – she said about Love Stories (2009-2018).

At the 2B Gallery in Budapest, the two series will be presented in parallel but in different forms. While Maria's photographs reflect the linearity of long-term relationships in a classic form on the wall, Lilla's images refer to the diversity of relationships: appearing floating in the space creating an imaginative forest. The individual photos evoke the emotions they experience. ‘The Body of the Other.’ ‘Ideas for Solution.’ ‘Identities.’ ‘The Images.’

(Judit Gellér, curator of 2018 Budapest exhibition)

BIO

Maria do Mar Rêgo (Toulouse, 1983), grew up in Montemor-o-Novo. In 2001, she studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, ​​the city she left for Arles in 2007, where she studied at the École Nationale Supérieur de Photographie. She currently lives in Portugal. She began to exhibit in 2005 in galleries and making interventions in public space. Maria do Mar exhibited in Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium and Germany, namely at the Atlantic Museum of Modern Arts, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2007); Church of São Vicente, Évora (2009); Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles (2010); Les Boutographies Festival, Montpelier (2014); Nîmes (2015); PhotoEspaña Festival (2016); Journées Internationales du Patrimoine, Paris (2016); PhotoBeijing, Beijing, (2016); Alvito (2017); Santiago de Compostela (2020). She was artist-in-residence at Casa de Velazquez (2015-2016), at Budapest Galéria (2018) and at Cuarto Pexigo, Santiago de Compostela (2019 and 2020).

https://mariadomarrego.com/

Lilla Szász (b. 1977, Budapest) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary, and Lisbon, Portugal. She obtained a MA in Aesthetics, Russian language and literature at the University of ELTE, Budapest in 2000. After graduating, Szász has been working as an art photographer and photo journalist, as well as teaching in Budapest and New York. She has had several solo shows in Hungary, as well as participated in group exhibitions as 2019: ‘Women in 3 Acts’, Fotogalleriet, Oslo, Norway, ‘We Will Not Change Our Show’ at Dum Umeni Mesta Arna in Brno, Czech Republic (2019), ‘The Way We See. An Overview of Hungarian Photography’ at the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland (2017). In 2012, her work was exhibited the company of Richard Avedon, Richard Billingham and Paz Errázuriz in the exhibition Aqui Estamos (Here we are), curated by Gerardo Mosquera and Monica Portillo, receiving 640.000 visitors and winning the public' prize at Photo España.

http://www.szaszlilla.hu/