ZSÓFI BARABÁS:
UNDER THE BREATHING SKY
Erika Deák Gallery is delighted to present Under the Breathing Sky, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Zsófi Barabás (b. 1980, Budapest), marking her fourth solo show with the gallery.
Under the Breathing Sky embodies both the essence and the expansion of Barabás’s painterly practice, spotlighting her advance into the three-dimensional. Her sustained engagement with colour, form, line, and texture explores modes of relationship: forms converge and clash, coalesce and dissipate, levitate and enlace. This preoccupation with connectivity underpins the exhibition.
Barabás’s daring use of colour, meandering lines, and pastose paint application creates warm, familiar environments brimming with life. Intersecting shapes suspended in abstract fields of colour oscillate between cellular and celestial scales, evoking enlarged microorganisms or aerial landscapes at once—river-like veins and lake-like organs coalescing into living, breathing systems. Reviving her black-and-white, drawing-like brushwork from the late 2000s, in Under the Breathing Sky (2026) broad black brushstrokes sweep across pristine white grounds, encircled by a rippled ring of royal blue. Vibrant, irregular, loose-ended loops overhang amoebic forms of colour, bound together by tentacular connections—unfolding according to the painting’s own internal logic.
At the same time, architectonically layered forms seek to break loose from the wall departing the painting to enter physical space, where they configure into a labyrinthine forest—revitalising and unfettering, releasing the constraints of the rectangular format. Black-on-white linear motifs extend into the crevices of her standalone sculptures, allowing temporalities and dimensions to amalgamate. Elsewhere, her densely applied, multicoloured brushstrokes evoke the CoBrA
group, with resonances of Karel Appel’s bold palette and fleshy impasto, while also drawing on her contemporaries—the spatial inventiveness of Carol Bove or the graphic complexity of Julie Mehretu.
The exhibition’s title, a line by Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth, suggests layering, rhythm, and movement within an all-pervasive sky. A sense of fresh air, anticipation, and optimism permeates the space, where breathing becomes a metaphor for renewal and regeneration—both cellular and celestial. Applying a stream of consciousness across painting and sculpture, Barabás echoes the unfiltered flow of thought, capturing internal monologues, sensory perception, and memory in real time, and forming a non-linear yet deeply personal mode of storytelling that
navigates the maze of life.
Zsófi Barabás’s practice invites viewers to narrativise and adapt her visual language into their own soliloquy. Her works remind us that we exist under the same breathing sky, articulating a sanguine sensibility rooted in connection. By forging attachments between isolable elements, she suggests a whole that coheres into a living presence—an overarching presence akin to a breathing vault of sky. Sweeping organic abstraction unfolds into a wide, open dome: a breath of fresh air.
Hanna Claris
For further information, please contact the gallery.
Opening: 2026 June 5, Friday, 6 PM
On view: 2026 June 5 - July 31
Open: Wednesday - Friday, 12:00 - 6:00 PM, and by appointment
Opening speech by Krisztina Tóth, writer, poet