Born in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1928, a New Yorker since 1957, Martha Szabo has consistently pursued a distinctive, painterly abstraction of the urban skyline. The unique POV of her 21st-floor studio afforded the artist sweeping views of a city in transition over many decades, notably the rapid development of the 1970s. These changes, subtle or dramatic, she recorded on canvas with oil paint, in a unique modernist style that merges abstraction with tribal forms.

Her substantial body of work is proof of Szabo’s commitment to the city she has observed and documented for 50+ years. Displaying a conceptual depth rarely seen in cityscapes, the paintings reference architecture, archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, geology. Towering silhouettes reminiscent of Pre-Columbian culture (or Picasso's African Period, and the haloed figures of medieval illuminated manuscripts) dominate the foreground of these highly personal vistas, as rectilinear structures yield to the biomorphic ones that Szabo calls “the souls of transformed buildings celebrating.”  In "Tectonics," formidable structures appear displaced as the very foundations of the city meet a powerful force from below ground.

Her sun-drenched studio for an observatory, Szabo’s brush captured skyscrapers-in-progress making their upward climb, while low-rise buildings, their days numbered, remained standing with undemolishable dignity. Predating the “Manhattanhenge” phenomenon by several decades, her paintings convey the splendor of urban sunrises and sunsets. From her South by Southwest coordinates, through blizzards and blackouts, Szabo recorded breathtaking urban tableaux.

Surviving World War II, Martha came of age in Budapest, part of the Hungarian Avant Garde’s second wave. Two years after earning her MFA from the University of Fine Arts, she immigrated to America with her archaeologist husband; the couple became naturalized citizens in 1957 (he later became a noted art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Among the couple’s friends and elder fellow-expats were the brilliant polymath filmmaker-anthropologist Paul Fejos, and the artist Emory Ladanyi, MD.

A longtime member of the Art Students League, Martha Szabo attended master classes in 1989-90 with Hananiah Harari, one of the founders of American Abstract Artists (1936) and a onetime student of Fernand Leger.