Dear audience, dear art lovers, dear Angelika fans
In literature, it is more fashionable than ever to blend the everyday life of the author with art. The biggest global book success of recent years is a series of novels in which the author recounts in six volumes, 3600 pages, details of his life that would interest his own mother. For several weeks now, the Budapest book-reading public has been enthralled by an autobiographical novel in which the author describes in meticulous detail how long it takes to milk the neglected mites covering her other boyfriend’s chest when she’s pushing them out.
Fortunately, autofiction in this form is unfeasible in the visual arts.
But it is something to strive for, unfortunately.
My parents are painters, so when I was a child we spent years at the art camp in Kecskemét. One of the residents of the adjacent studio was – I know now – an early pioneer of autofiction. Every day he pissed into a separate cucumber jar, which at the end of the day he meticulously labelled with a school notebook vignette, wrote the date on it, and then placed the jar in a long line along the ledge of the studio window. In its way, the pee journal was both fascinating and thought-provoking: some of the jars were a different colour, but I never dared ask why.
Angelika is a very personal creator, but fortunately not autofictional. She is rather magical.
And she is also very personal and even braver, as in her fresh landscapes exhibited here she fearlessly touches on Budapest motifs that the natives love just as much, but typically only tourists dare to photograph.
This is what started the avalanche on the walls. It was in December 2023, when the Florida Pulp Brother, aka Javier Mayoral, was exhibiting in Angelika’s gallery in the Margaret Quarter, that our hero walked Pulp Brother and his wife on the Danube bank near the Start Gallery. And the famous Spanish-American meme painter insisted on having his photo taken with the Parliament in the background. As an almost-born Budapest native since the age of six, Angelika had such an intense cringe at the idea of photographing the Parliament that she was so frightened that she began painting a landscape cycle of Budapest as a magical-symbolic landscape.
What you see here is the fresh, crisp harvest of the past six months.
The images shown here are very different in many ways, but the mechanism of action is similar. With a few simple strokes, the master has sketched a motif that has something like the role of the red pill in The Matrix. If you’re willing to buy it, you’re immediately pulled into the universe behind the motif, where Angelica accompanies you as a kind of Morpheus, while at the same time giving you complete freedom to see the reality behind the image that suits you.
This exhibition can therefore be enjoyed in more ways than one. Both by trying to decipher and interpret the artist’s private mythology, and by using the artist as a conduit to the other world, behind whose back one can safely immerse oneself in one’s own fantasies.
One of Angelika’s favourite sights in Budapest seems to be the one from the middle of Margaret Bridge, looking downstream towards the Parliament and Gellért Hill. When I was in high school, this was my route to my best friend’s house and as I love walking, I often took a non-tram. On those occasions, I would stop for a while in the middle and wonder if I would ever get a girlfriend. Angelika, I learned, used to brood here about emigrating.
As she hasn’t done so yet, the result of the match is for the time being 1:0.
When I saw the paintings live for the first time, Angelika told me, among other things, that at the beginning of the cycle she was most concerned with the literal and figurative opposition between the Parliament and the Statue of Liberty. Or rather, the symbolist public cinema that plays out on Margaret Bridge as one walks from Pest to Buda. For a long time the building of the legislature completely obscures the statue, and then suddenly freedom appears, but suddenly in opposition to the symbolic centre of power. How this is not a forced interior cinema is illustrated by the fact that another land art artist, who arrived in Budapest when Angelika was older than him, was also inspired by the same sight. This artist, Viktor Orbán, who, unlike Angelika, was not impressed by either the symbolic centre of power or freedom, created the third apex of the power triangle, the terrace of the Carmelite Monastery, which is invisible but present in all the Margaret Bridge paintings.
It is already part of the private mythology of Angelika, a woman of Russian origin, Hungarian culture, a woman and a mother of what she defines as a “complicated nationality”, what layers of meaning are hidden in a statue of a woman that both symbolises freedom and was made as a grateful gift to the Soviet army that liberated Hungary and then, with the same momentum, enslaved Hungary, raping masses of Hungarian women along the way.
Talking in her gallery, Angelika noted how many unexpected places you see the sculpture from around the city. This is a basic experience for me because I am from Yossefváros. The Statue of Liberty can be seen from quite surprising corners of Józsefváros, including the small window of the pantry of our childhood home. But it literally brought destruction to my homeland. Where you see the statue, the statue sees you. And whoever puts cannons at the base of the statue can see you. Part of the reason why the urban landscape of my childhood looked like Berlin 3 days after the occupation of the city was that in revenge for the resistance in Corvin in ’56, the 8th district was shot from Gellért Hill, the Citadel and the area around the statue.
Despite all these layers, this exhibition is neither sad nor depressing. Rather, I would call it magical.
Angelika plays with the familiar vision. Literally. What’s more, she’s in one of my favourite genres, alternate reality sci-fi. I therefore use some of the images exhibited here for childish, but all the more childish daydreaming.
Have you ever wondered what that elongated thing in the middle of the city is that separates Pest and Buda? Why should the geography teacher believe it’s a river? What if there were a 250-500 metre wide, carefully mown meadow winding between Pest and Buda, which a company owned by Lőrinc Mészáros had been granted a 99-year concession to use as a golf course? The perfectly manicured grassy strip is always unpopulated, although if you squint hard you might occasionally see two tiny, round figures waving hair-thin sticks in the distance, but maybe that’s just your eyes glazing over.
And what if there was a river, but it wasn’t water, but spinach?
Angelika is a great magician, because she didn’t stop there, but in her painting hanging next to the aforementioned one, she also played with the possibility of what would happen if the city disappeared and we found ourselves standing in the middle of the stinking nowhere on the Margaret Bridge. Which would connect the flat pastures with the hilly pastures of a post- or pre-apocalyptic Budapest.
This image – for me at least – is funny, playful and makes you think about what Budapest for humans gives the world compared to the Budapest imagined by herbivores.
Making Budapest disappear is a great trick in itself, because it makes the existing city much more vivid than if the artist had tried to paint each of its inhabitants in motion.
This blue is my other favourite daydreamy picture. As I looked at it, I was initially simply amused at what Budapest would be like if, by the vagaries of climate change, it became not a desert oasis but an archipelago in the Pannonian basin that is once again flooding the Carpathian Basin. In this universe, I wondered what would happen if the dream of the caveman would magically come true, only the funny fairy would not take us back to the age of the tarsoly plate and their horses, but to the Miocene, seven million years earlier, to Budapest, populated by much more ancient domestic animals, where the megalodon is walked on the main boulevard by the aunts living in the underwater caves of Terézváros instead of the pug.
But unfortunately, as I am not only an infantile adult but also a journalist working for an independent newspaper, the same image works as an alternative science fiction in which Budapest is suddenly moved to the border of Scandinavia, to the welfare strait separating Copenhagen and Malmö, so Pest is moved to Denmark and Buda to Sweden, with all the mundane consequences.
I also loved this series because it appeals to the imagination and the emotions at the same time, and it does the latter through colour. As the son of a painter who uses crazy intense colours and the father of a born colourist daughter, I am simply happy that the colours here are not a cover-up or an illustration, but the essence.
I’ve highlighted a few images, but all the paintings and graphics here are perfect for pausing in front of, and then taking Angelika’s tactful cajoling to instantly jump into the Budapest of your choice, without the need to consume unhealthy drugs or even unhealthier length novels.
The exhibition is now open, have a nice daydream!