The visual language of Kata Könyv’s expressive painting is characterised by the duality of philosophical thinking and an approach that transcends reality and verges on the grotesque. Her figurative art draws on the tradition of classical panel painting, which she renews in a contemporary manner by using a wide range of often transparent media and materials and by interpreting painting as a self-reflexive metalanguage. In her works, she redefines the oeuvres of art ists from earlier generations who are important to her, sometimes in the form of homages (Michelangelo, Bernini, Caspar David Friedrich and contemporary female artists), or simply by evoking their visual language (Rubens, Piranesi). Her works focus on different aspects of vision and perception; she frequently employs the phenomena of reflection and distortion in her paintings, while opening up intriguing perspectives through various objects linked to visuality. Her glass-like and metallic surfaces are formal representations of clarity/purity and vulnerability, while their geometric structures stabilise the dynamism of the pictorial spaces.
The depiction of the human body occupies a prominent place in her art, consciously challenging the idealised concept of beauty of our age in pursuit of perfection in order to make room for the body’s continually changing, vulnerable and transient nature. Rather than depicting the body in an absolute, sculp tural and monumental manner, she presents fragments, expressing wholeness through the principle of pars pro toto and frequently highlighting hands and faces, rich in symbolism. The face is an expression of personality and a bearer of identity, revealing both our inner struggles and a transcendent state of being. The sensual lips are passionate yet essential to the preservation of life, while the eyes, depicted as the mirror of the soul, simultaneously see and capture the viewer’s gaze. Her self-portraits are visual diaries functioning as the most personal confessions and thus also as psychological self-dissections. Showing the body through different surfaces – glass panels and the metallic surfaces of everyday household objects – and the distorted impressions of fragments of faces and hair in scanographies, images produced with a scanner, are mani festations of fragmentation as well as opportunities for self-observation and critical scrutiny, confronting us with existential questions and alluding to the continual change of identity. This is a documentation of the passage of time, while the artist is absorbed in the subjective experiences unfolding during the creative process. The frequently appearing hands are symbols of artistic crea tion, action, as well as of erotic or affectionate embraces; through movements condensed into a single image, she evokes different existential states and life situations, simultaneously expressing the fullness of life, finitude and the im mortality of the soul.
A significant innovation in Kata Könyv’s career is her creation of soft pic tures. Besides her earlier, classical oil-on-canvas works, she makes tactile, relief-like works with the forms and visual language of ancient, Renaissance and Baroque sculpture serving as their point of departure; thus, the expanded dimensions of her homage soft pictures inspired by Michelangelo and Bernini can be understood as distinctive paraphrases. She transforms the formal lan guage of sculpture into two dimensions, while retaining its spatiality. She ap plies microplush to a support made of furniture board and sponge, which she then paints in oils. Her surfaces project beyond the plane and create trompe l’œil effects, giving the works a dual perspective; she is able to evoke a fully three-dimensional sense of space through her use of colour, tonalities and shadows. The expanded dimensions of the soft pictures make it possible to touch them physically, experiencing their texture and depth as though we were genuinely in touching distance, touching human flesh and skin. These sensa tions are associated with the feminine principle, evoking warmth and familiarity. The works mounted on the wall play a prominent role: they eliminate the con ventional observer’s position and break down the distance between the image and the viewer, allowing them to become much more a part of the visual, indeed haptic, experience and recognise themselves and the world around them while engaging with the picture.
The marks or traces of injuries left on the body, and the moon-like belly paintings, rendered in bluish tones and assembled into a triptych-like configu ration, are distinctive paraphrases of the iconic 1989 poster by the American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger: reinterpretations of the slogan Your body is a battleground, also at the level of communal and legal ideologies, although the primary concern for Kata Könyv is the sensual presentation of bodily ex periences. In the pair of works Navel Gazers, arranged as a diptych, she con nects with an important art-historical tradition through the use of concave and convex spherical mirrors (e.g. Van Eyck, Velázquez, Holbein and Manet). The built-in specula primarily prompt us to confront ourselves; thanks to their optical effects, they are able to gather and expand space, enabling the paint ings to be seen in a social context as well. By representing the microcosm and macrocosm, Kata Könyv creates a sense of wholeness, while the mirror is si multaneously a symbol of the soul and, through its association with vanity, a vanitas symbol. The gesture of emphasising the navel evokes the cornerstone of cosmic origin and the source of life; interpreted as an omphalos, it marks the world axis (axis mundi), where the earthly world meets the sacred dimen sion. The act of contemplating the navel expresses excessive introspection and egocentric thinking, while also presenting a possible artistic approach: the artist’s reflection on herself and on her relationship to art.
Réka Fazakas, curator
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Building on the ideas of Daniel Arasse, the 2026 Frissen Exhibition explores the Renaissance thesis that a work of art inevitably reflects the individuality of its creator. Although the death of painting has been predicted many times—both since the advent of photography and from the perspective of critiques of capitalism—the genre has always been revitalized and strengthened through aesthetic and social self-reflection. The Műcsarnok’s seventh exhibition in the “one artist—one room—one curator” series seeks to answer the question of why artists paint today. This collection of personal exhibitions showcases the diversity of the profession through the latest abstract and figurative works by six Hungarian contemporary painters, brought directly from their studios.
Artist-curator pairs: Ákos Bánki and Szilvia Reischl, Réka Kaszás and Mária Kondor-Szilágyi, Gábor Király and Gréta Garami, Kati Könyv and Réka Fazakas, Tamás Menyhárt and Zoltán Rockenbauer, Kata Verebics and Anna Blanka Nagy