Although illustration lies at the heart of Dóra Keresztes’s art, over the course of a career spanning more than four decades, she has also explored painting, poster design, stamp design, and stage and costume design for theater, as well as animated filmmaking. Her exhibition at the Kunsthalle highlights her most recent works from 2025, focusing above all on those pieces which, while connected to texts—and in some cases originally published as their illustrations—nevertheless articulate Keresztes’s autonomous artistic intentions. In addition to her poetry and book illustrations, the exhibition also features her animated films and sacred works.
Her art embodies a complex, symbolically layered world, rooted in ancient cosmological narratives that seek to explore the relationship between the human soul and the universe. She draws from Mesopotamian, Christian-mystical, and Eastern cosmological traditions that reflect on the origins of celestial bodies and their systems, yet her primary source of inspiration is the rich heritage of Hungarian folktales, which she reimagines in the language of contemporary graphic art—through the timeless beauty of relief printing—in lyrical, grotesque, and spiritual forms. Her works narrate inner journeys, in which the soul travels from the underworld toward the celestial, spiritual sphere, during which her figures—or the viewer themselves—undergo a mythical initiation and transformation.
Her peculiar creatures—humorous and yet weighty hybrid animal-human figures that interpenetrate and merge with each other—seem to emerge from the personal and collective unconscious of humanity, creating a surreal and fairy-tale-like dreamworld. They also carry with them ancient meanings, pointing to the duality of human nature, the traits of our hidden shadow-self, and the world’s polarity. The structure of her works is characterized by a metaphysical conception of space and time, whose basic element is the circle. Figures that turn back into themselves, complex forms that nonetheless again and again resolve into circular arrangements, come into being—forms that may be read as cosmograms symbolizing the structure and harmony of the universe.
The craftsmanship and beauty of her graphic art recall the world of medieval woodcuts; her sacred works draw on the visuality of the coffered ceilings of Transylvanian Reformed churches, while her animated films can be understood as visual poetry shaped into moving images.
curator: Gréta Garami