‘My main themes, which have also characterised my works up to now, are frag ments of the human figure – most often faces – in detached contexts, appear ing as imprints of personally experienced situations, as emotional gestures, often in a visual framing that may transform them into something surreal. In recent years, I have devoted particular attention to exploring the present and the past in a single picture, treating subjects that have been of particular inter est to me at the time.’
Kati Verebics lives, works and breathes between layers. The classical tra dition of painting, photography, collage and the transfer technique co-exist in her art in a close and inseparable symbiosis that extends far beyond the use of materials. Her paintings do not record a single isolated moment or a static scene but weave together different temporal planes and cultures as well as subjective and collective memory. In addition to layers of oil, acrylic, charcoal and pastel, media such as papier-mâché, plaster and mud from the River Jordan also appear, transforming the passage of time into material reality.
The dense layering of the paintings also determines the viewer’s experience, which is based on a physical shift in perspective. Observed from a distance, the canvases present a unified, distilled whole but as we move closer, their macro-structure breaks down, the visual experience is transformed and the works’ inner micro-universe is revealed. Treasures salvaged from the depths of antique shops and from travels abroad emerge from the surface: yellowed pages from old medical books, dressmaking patterns, maps, Bartók scores found in an Egyptian market, and fragments of coloured paper handmade by the artist’s husband. Collage-making is not a planned or calculated act in Verebics’s creative process. She first tears up the pieces of paper she has collected, and only afterwards does she search among the fragments for those that seem to call out to be placed next to one another.
To understand the roots of Kati Verebics’s art, we must travel back to Dég in Fejér County. She and her sister grew up in a family in which culture was a natural part of everyday life. Both their parents shaped their environment: their mother as a drawing teacher, and their father as a teacher of history and a mayor with a strong commitment to his local community. Their father cam paigned to save the Hollandi House, located beside the park of Dég Castle and once used as a pulmonary sanatorium for a young countess, and, uniquely for those times, organised contemporary exhibitions there. The sisters grew up in this artistic milieu, making the Hungarian University of Fine Arts a natural next step for them.
In addition to collage, the method most frequently employed by Kati Verebics is the transfer technique, which she has been using since 2015. It is an image transfer method that allows a photograph to be incorporated into the work and then become an integral part of the picture. As a result, drawing, painting and photography appear on the canvas simultaneously. The greatest value of this method lies in how it introduces an additional, translucent layer into the picture made using classical techniques, thus giving the work a deeper, multidimensional space.
Verebics’s painting is essentially a visual diary in which her personal emo tions, travels and the events of her life can be traced. Yet, there is a peculiar contradiction here: by its very nature, a diary is private, something one writes only for oneself, while the artist presents her paintings to the public. Moreover, alongside individual experiences, the history of humanity also appears in the paintings. While the paintings record subjective memory, the materials used in the collages bring collective cultural memory into the pictorial space.
The artist is particularly fond of painting the faces of ancient sculptures she once saw in museums, in which she perceives the features of her friends and loved ones, and this association sets the work in motion in her mind. The same personal approach characterises the portraits of herself and her daugh ter, Frida. In these works, part of the face is almost always obscured by some botanical or natural element – a shell, pomegranate or ginkgo leaf, for example. This concealment makes the paintings extremely revealing and reticent at the same time: the viewer may get a glimpse into the personal stories, but their full reality remains hidden, allowing the work to retain the original, secret character of a diary.
In recent years, the experience of the Siwa Oasis in Egypt and the artist’s regular travels between Budapest and Cairo have become defining elements of her work. She lives between two homes because of her husband, who is an Egyptian visual artist, and their young daughter. Siwa’s labyrinth-like, ruinous urban structures, the textile patterns of Bedouin culture and sacred objects in Egyptian museums can all be discovered in Verebics’s paintings. Her working process itself also breaks with linearity: she often begins her works in her Cairo studio, working from photographs and sketches, then folds the canvases into a suitcase and brings them home, where she completes them in Budapest, working on several paintings in parallel. Her journeys and the luxuriant world of the oasis also lend her works the elemental presence of nature, which assumes new prominence in her most recent pieces.
Kati Verebics’s exhibition creates a refuge in which the noise of the out side world falls silent. Standing before the paintings, visitors pass through the stages of concealment and revelation, eventually reaching the micro-world of the collages. This inner silence and retreat also surround the artist in her everyday life. Kati currently lives and works in a studio flat atop a church, filled with windows opening onto the sky, where the sound of the bells is not noise but an inspiring backdrop to her daily work.
Anna Blanka Nagy, 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