Bozó is one of London’s most successful young emerging artists, despite creating his first large-scale paintings of colorful cartoon-ish creatures only a few years ago. While the prices have not reached the heights of market darlings who star in the main evening sales, he is among a cohort of artists who have quietly enjoyed a meteoric rise in the international art market while having had little institutional or media attention to their work.
Szabolcs Bozó’s Adorable Creatures Were an Antidote to Lockdown Blues. Now They’re Fetching Six-Figure Sums at Auction
Lucy Howie, March 6, 2023
Joy, play and imagination are important to Szabolcs Bozó. Known among friends as “Szabi,” the young Hungarian artist’s vivid paintings of cute animal characters speak to his appetite for fun.
“Selfishly, I make things to keep myself excited and happy,” the artist told me early on a Monday morning, before he headed to his East London studio for the day. It just so happens that they are also selling for vast sums at auction.
The artist’s journey began when he moved to London in 2011 from his hometown Pécs in Hungary when he was just 19, not to paint, but to learn English. While working as a waiter in a London restaurant, he produced hundreds of cartoon drawings on his order pad. Between 2013 and 2018, he translated his hobby into a larger format, working from a studio above the restaurant, creating his googly-eyed paintings for fun and posting his works onto Instagram—but buyers will find none of these works on the market.
“My only works on the market are from 2018 onwards. This is because I was making a lot of paintings in my room above the restaurant up until this point, but I never planned to sell them. Most of my works from before 2018 are now destroyed because I repainted them when I couldn’t afford new canvases,” Bozó explained.
All that changed in 2018, when a Spanish gallerist found his paintings on Instagram and flew him to Mallorca for an artist residency. After that, “I just kept making new works and everything just flowed from that,” he said.
Bozó’s fantastical paintings are now highly sought after on the primary and secondary international art market. Entrepreneur and founder of WOAW Gallery, Kevin Poon, is an enthusiastic supporter who first came across Bozó’s mythical characters online during the COVID-19 pandemic. “You have to try really hard to be able to buy one of Szabi’s paintings,” he explained, “I was lucky enough to visit his studio back in 2021, and commissioned a piece by him last year.” Poon’s commission, The Last Supper now adorns a restaurant in Central Hong Kong.