Alexandra Clare Bacskay (pr. ‘baatch-koy’) was born on the 13th day of the last month of arguably the most uneventful year of the declining 1970’s. 1978 started on a Sunday, witnessed the first ever episode of ‘The Smurfs’, blinked while US porn mogul Larry Flynt was shot at, gave birth to the worlds first test tube baby, and blithely bore arms against Space Invaders (the world’s first arcade game).

Bacskay is the daughter of New Zealand resident Scottish artist Jane Nicol and spent her childhood in relative isolation on a high country sheep & cattle station at least 45min drive from anywhere that may have considered gumboots an inapropriate item of footwear to wear to a funeral. Her most meaningful memorable relationships, beyond her Mother, Grandmother and various farm and domestic animals, extend to muddy puddles, crayons, porridge, mountain creeks, builders string, matchbox cars and tall fields of clover and lucerne.

Her stepfather George is a quantum chemist and accomplished amateur photographer. He tells the most spellbinding stories of his escape from revolutionary Hungary as a child, on foot, in the snow, with his family, eventually arriving in Australia as a refugee without a word of English. She marvels in awe at the otherworldly distance between that boy in the snow and the Cambridge scholar, University of Sydney lecturer and culinary genius that is her present day Apu. She marvels almost as much at the Hungarian paintings, pots, plates, tapestries, sketches and photographs on each and every wall of his Federation style Sydney home.

Surviving close to two decades of all three levels of the contemporary education system and associated playground society, Bacskay has since returned to her world where spoons bend and crows wear clown shoes. In love again with muddy puddles and with the river city of Brisbane Australia, crayons have long since given way to oil paint, matchbox cars to guitars and the words that fit in and out of the sounds they make. Bacskay believes that our fortunes lie in the strength we find to act as if we are significant. To act as if we are a part of the sum of the whole of humanity and from that perspective far greater than the sum of its occasionally disingenuous parts.

As an artist Bacskay’s eclectic, technically extraordinary and often darkly humorous commentary on societal, political and psychological foibles have earned her critical acclaim. She is capable of a level of realism that almost steps off the canvas and a contradistinct quality of visceral abstraction that invites the viewer inside. While for the most remaining detatched from contemporaneously fashionable movements/artists, she sites a fascination with the exquisitely temporal vanitas still life of Claesz, the monumental simplicity of Dutch golden boy Vermeer, the wretched light & depths of Rothko and Pollock, the grotesque beauty and conceptual exhilaration of Damien Hirst and, closer to home, Joanna Braithewaite’s delicate and queerly humorous surrealism, Neil Frazer’s seductive and dimensionally challenging tactile explorations and Hotere’s potently accessible assemblage of geographical, cultural and symbolic wisdom. Bacskay is as much influenced by the music she listens to and writes, the television and film she watches, the books and philosophies she has digested, the people she talks to and observes and the thoughts and emotions pursuent of her conscience than by any other visual practitioner or precedent. The resulting body of work is, for the most part, indefineable in style or genre yet far from being disparate seems as deftly illustrative of concept as “there is evidence in a shadow of the light.”

Alex Bacskay, NMIT Visual Arts graduate (DipVA), exhibits throughout Australia/NZ and sells internationally. She is the lead singer/songwriter in the band Medollic (medollic.com) and the youngest artist featured in the book Art New Zealand Today. She lives in Brisbane, Australia and divides her time between her own art, her design company (wealthandhellbeing.com) and life as a recording musician.





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