EXPO Chicago: Kate Zimmerman Turpin & Maria Szakats

For Expo Chicago 2026, Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present a two person presentation of works by Maria Szakats and Kate Zimmerman Turpin. While Szakats engages with art history and material culture, and Turpin with the atmospheric resonance of the American South, both artists utilize the natural world as their subject matter.

Our presentation of new brushed mohair on canvas works by Maria Szakats centers on her use of flowers as a symbolic language shaped by memory, displacement, and transformation. As a child, Szakats spent a formative year with her grandmother in Hungarian Romania after her parents relocated to Austria as political refugees; the house was lined with embroidered floral textiles that created an immersive environment that was both comforting and claustrophobic, an image that has persists in her current work.

Kate Zimmerman Turpin's works, meanwhile, are rooted in the specific light and terrain of the Texas Hill Country, translated through layered acrylic and pastel into remembered landscapes. Rather than transcribing the physical world, Turpin allows botanical forms to surface and disperse into fields of color, avoiding sharp edges in favor of rhythmic, atmospheric motion. Her compositions balance dense floral accumulation with expansive open ground, situating the viewer in a porous space where the external environment and internal emotion become indistinguishable.

Maria Szakats (b. Romania, 1984; lives and works in Paris) holds an MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. She has had solo exhibitions with Megan Mulrooney in Los Angeles; Brooke Benington in London, Galerie Chloe Salgado in Paris, along with numerous two-person and group exhibitions. She is represented by Megan Mulrooney.

Kate Zimmerman Turpin (b. 1990, Houston, TX, ; lives and works in Fredericksburg, TX), holds a BA from University of Texas, Austin. Shehad her first solo exhibition with Megan Mulrooney in Spring 2026.