Martha Szabo (b 1928) immigrated to New York from her native Hungary in 1957. Having survived the Holocaust and a Nazi labor camp in Austria, she earned a master’s degree from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. This series of paintings are of the New York skyline as viewed from the roof top of her apartment building through the 1970s. She found the rooftop a liberating and transformative space where her imagination ran wild and free. Initially, she saw the elements on the rooves as blocky, geometric shapes and non-objective abstractions influenced by her modernist training. Later, Surrealistic fantasies emerged, the chimneys and their ethereal smoke morphed into anthropomorphic forms and later in the series, sinewy figures embraced and danced together in the night skies. Szabo referred to her imaginative vignettes as the “souls of the transformed building celebrating”. For Szabo, the roof tops, specifically, and New York in general, was a celebration of her liberation from the Holocaust and freedom to pursue her art and painting.

There will be an exhibition catalog with an essay written by Gwen F. Chanzit, Ph.D., Curator Emerita, Denver Art Museum