Galamb Thorday's paintings are interspersed with consumer-oriented references that only dissolve their perfectionism on closer inspection. They reflect a society in which the boundary between products and consumers is becoming increasingly blurred.
The artist resists today's cynical wisdoms such as “You don't need much to be happy” with extremely lavish demands for quality of life. In this sense, she resides in a promise of a personal and private estate (Private Property). We see luminous salt stone oases, balancing stones, wellness treatments and concentration activities such as breaking boards in martial arts.
In the backgrounds: surreal constellations, traces of stories, exaggeratedly beautiful natural landscapes, Zen gardens and playful stone balustrades. However, there are eerie silhouettes, blurred and out of focus, as if liquefied in the shadows. This threat is always lurking behind Galamb Thorday's opulent, elegant motifs and yet is so easy to overlook - simply suppressed, as in “real” - in her large formats, as in the frenzy of the social media - self care - treat yourself - cosmos.

Thorday, who came into contact with the romanticization of a time that idealized the Austro-Hungarian Empire through her Hungarian roots on her father's side, already processed similar tendencies in her studies abroad in London (Brexit 2019), in which she captures the mythical, fantastic threshold and peak moments in her process of overcoming disappointment. Consider, for example, “Cum grano salis”, in which a comb pauses in a swing over a head, also reflecting the aspects of her work that playfully address problematic aspects of the flow of expectations. This allows her to take people's underlying, genuine insecurity seriously, or as she says: “To paint the fears beautifully into the pictures."

Fredi Thiele