Ilona explores themes of dominance and submission, power and vulnerability in instinctive, sweeping brushtrokes across aluminium, glass and resin board. Deliciously glossy and sensuous, her paintings are an exercise in both spontaneity and restraint - the narrative hinted at, the colour palette limited, the figures poised on the cusp, compelling and intense. 

‘Szalay returns to the same central tension: the body as both subject and object. Beautiful, vulnerable and exposed. Always performing, never fully still. At a time when images of women are endlessly produced, Szalay's work slows the frame, inviting something closer to contemplation - or complicity’ - Len Gordon, Art Plugged, 2025.

Ilona Szalay (b. 1975) studied English Literature at the University of Oxford and went on to study at Central St Martins and Byam Shaw School of Art.

Competitions & Awards: Ilona won the inaugural Women In Art Fair Prize 2025 and was the recipient of the ORA Contemporary Art Prize (Italy). She was a finalist for the prestigious Threadneedle Prize, long-listed for the Contemporary British Art Prize, 2024 and also a finalist for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, 2018. Her exhibition history includes the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016 & 2008, the British Painter’s Association and the Barbican.

Solo Exhibitions: ‘Only lovers left alive’, London, 2024; ‘We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea’, Bruton, 2023; ‘The witch’s house’, Edinburgh, 2022; ‘Chronic Fantasies’, London, 2022; ‘Delirium’, London, 2021; ‘Some are born to sweet delight’, Edinburgh, 2020; ‘Oracle’, Edinburgh, 2019; ‘Mirror’ - Pulse Miami, 2019; ‘Volta14’, Basel, 2018;                                                                                   

Group Exhibitions: ‘Islomania’, Margate, curated by Cathy Lomax, 2025; ‘Reverb’, London, curated by Grace Mattingly. 2025; Women in art fair, 2025; ‘Sex Magic’, London, book launch for Amy Hale published by Tate, 2024; ‘The coordinate plane’, NYC, 2023; ‘Portal’, London, 2023; ‘Safe as Milk’, London, 2021; ‘Cruel Intentions’, London, 2021; London Art Fair 2018-2020; Manchester Art Fair, 2019; ‘Radical Love’ 2018; Panter and Hall, NYC, 2018; ‘LA Summer’, Edinburgh, 2018; Art16 Olympia, 2016.