Hungarian Reality
Power, Identity and the Theatre of the Present
Hungarian Reality is a series of paintings reflecting on contemporary Hungary — a country shaped by history, national identity and the tensions of the present. The series also looks beyond Hungary’s borders, reflecting on the political relationships and historical tensions that connect the country to its neighbours, to Europe and to the wider world.
Political figures, historical symbols and fragments of everyday life appear within layered compositions in which past and present continually overlap. Public spectacle encounters private experience; national narratives encounter individual reality.
The paintings do not attempt to illustrate political events or provide simple answers. They use the visual language of painting to question how power presents itself, how history is remembered and how collective identity is constructed.
Hungary is the immediate point of departure. The questions raised by the works, however, reach beyond a single country.
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Celebration and Social Reality
A spectacular national celebration unfolds above a very different social reality. The painting confronts public display with those who remain at the margins, asking what a society chooses to celebrate — and what it chooses not to see.
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Celebration and Social Reality
Fireworks illuminate Budapest while figures at the margins of society occupy the foreground. Public celebration and private hardship exist simultaneously, raising a simple but uncomfortable question: what does a nation choose to make visible?
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History, Power and the Direction of a Nation
Hungary’s present cannot be separated from the weight of its past. Historical figures, political symbols and contemporary protagonists occupy the same pictorial space, transforming the painting into a confrontation between memory, power and the question of national direction.
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Power, Alliances and Dependence
Political relationships are rarely based on friendship alone. Behind the central figure, other faces emerge from the pictorial space, suggesting a network of alliances, interests and dependencies that reaches beyond national borders.
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Power, Performance and National Identity
Political authority appears alongside the architecture and symbols of the nation, while the surrounding figures introduce another reality. The painting explores the distance between the representation of power and the lives over which that power is exercised.Political authority appears alongside the architecture and symbols of the nation, while the surrounding figures introduce another reality. The painting explores the distance between the representation of power and the lives over which that power is exercised.
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The view to the East
Within the Hungarian Reality series, the work expands the perspective beyond Hungary’s borders. Russia’s war against Ukraine has become part of Hungary’s own political reality, shaped by geography, history and the country’s contested relationship with Moscow, Kyiv and the European Union.
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ABOUT THE SERIES
Hungarian Reality emerged from my continuing relationship with the country in which I was born.
Distance changes the way we see a place, but it does not dissolve our connection to it. Returning to Hungary means encountering both familiarity and contradiction: memories of the past, the realities of the present and competing visions of what the country should become.
These paintings are not intended as political cartoons or illustrations of daily news. Politics enters them because politics shapes the environment in which people live. Historical references appear because the past remains present in Hungarian identity.
Through painting, I try to create a space in which these different realities can coexist — sometimes seriously, sometimes grotesquely, sometimes painfully.