Reclaiming Buda Castle
Thirty-Five Years of an Artist – Gallerist – Collector Triangle

Gábor Ébli ╱ Translation by Zsófia Kecze

Icon- and cover image:
János Szirtes: Plus 7 ╱ 2005 ╱ acrylic on canvas ╱ 85×105 cm

Opposite, at the junction of Batthyány Street and Várfok Street, artist János Szirtes purchased an apartment in the same year for use as his studio. Having just passed his thirtieth year, he was already a recognized figure within the Hungarian art scene. His generation was no longer burdened by the weight of the communist ideology: the latter half of the 1980s represented a veritable golden age of Hungarian contemporary art. Political content remained available as a source of inspiration, intriguing to foreign audiences as well, yet no longer functioned as a compulsory framework. Stylistically, the trans-avantgarde liberated the use of motif, colour and material.

Szirtes had previously worked on the upper floor of his family home, but by that time his success as both performance and visual artist enabled him to acquire his own studio. He chose a ground-floor apartment, facilitating the movement of his large-scale canvases, an essential condition for an artist who regarded painting as an extension of body art, as a physical imprint of performance. The neighbourhood was dear to him; he had attended the nearby Toldy Secondary School.

The proximity between the two men soon led to acquaintance and friendship, preceding their formal professional collaboration. They developed a shared ritual, the so-called korlátozás (“railing”), referring to their regular conversations while leaning on the railing in front of what is now the Várfok Project Room. They even commissioned personalised nameplates for the railing: “János Szirtes, railer – designated place for railing on the railing.” While Szalóky’s plate was later stolen, Szirtes’ has been preserved to this day. The artist’s first solo exhibition at Várfok Gallery was held in 1992.

The summer exhibition of 2025 at Tér-Kép Gallery, operated by the Municipality of Buda Castle, presented Szirtes’ early works, those produced prior to his relocation to the Várfok area, from private collections. The earliest work in the exhibition, Göbzi (1985), together with two other significant pieces from the same period (Widow and Dream-Image I), belong to the private collection of Károly Szalóky. His collection also encompasses numerous works from Szirtes’ later periods and was exhibited in the French Cultural Centre in Budapest in 2005 and published in 2011 in a richly-illustrated volume.

The chronologically latest work in the Tér-Kép Gallery show, Batthyány I. (1990), already signals in its title that it was executed in the new studio. Péter Szép discovered Szirtes’s oeuvre in the early 2000s through an intuitive affinity and subsequently acquired nine large-format paintings. Among them, Aranyköpés (Wisecrack) featured on the covers of two catalogues of Szép’s collection, issued in 2006 and 2008. Between 2006 and 2009, this collection was exhibited in six venues, from Budapest to Székesfehérvár and Stuttgart, in varying selections but invariably including Szirtes’ works as central components.

The painting Mohamed (1987) holds particular significance: in 2010 it featured in the Open Collections exhibition organized from the collections of members of the Friends of the Ludwig Museum, hosted at the Józsefváros Gallery, then functioning as Ludwig Inzert, an external venue of the Ludwig Museum.

Further works in the Tér-Kép Gallery exhibition derived from the collections of Gábor Hunya and László Zimányi. The collection of Károly Gerendai likewise offers several examples; one painting, created to commemorate the birth of Szirtes’ daughter Alíz, can be seen on the wall of the downtown restaurant Rumour, as part of its interior design concept. László Hradszki has adopted a distinctly contemporary mode of sharing his collection by posting its works on social media; among them, Szikrai from Szirtes’ Voronoi Diagram-inspired series is thus publicly known.

Among institutional collections, a notable example is the seventh work from the Dream-Image series (1986), acquired by the Raiffeisen Bank Collection in 2000 for display in the CEO’s office, featured in the 2002 representative album and in the catalogue of the collection’s 2007 Vienna exhibition. Another early work, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, entered the Hungarian National Bank Collection two decades later and was included in the MNB’s 2025 exhibition of Szirtes’ works in Győr.

Public museums likewise acquired works from the artist’s early period: the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs holds one of the earliest and largest, Miracle Stag (1984), painted on industrial textile, while the Ludwig Museum obtained Two Together (1987), an acrylic on canvas.

It is less widely known that Szirtes, celebrated both as performer and painter, also produced photo-based series during his early period. Szalóky’s collection includes an exemplary instance of this approach in the Ginseng photo-silkscreen series (1983). A graduate in graphic arts, Szirtes frequently worked in the printmaking studios of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts even during his postgraduate studies. He consistently sought to test the boundaries of the medium, aspiring to transcend two specific limitations: that printmaking be not only black and white but also in colour, and that it might be hybridized with other media, such as photography.

He employed historical and politically charged photographs as his source material. In the Korean War images, soldiers play accordions, sing, smile broadly for censored camp photographs, or celebrate with harmonicas. The presence of a red hammer-and-sickle seal makes explicit that these were tools of ideological communication. Through the process of multiple printing, Szirtes personalized and transformed the images, enclosing them in frames composed of small red stars and overlaying them with skeletal figures, drawn, significantly, with ginseng. This ancient medicinal plant, the millennia-old panacea of Chinese, Korean and other Asian cultures, serves here, contrary to its energizing associations, as a memento of decay. Yet the root-like, quasi-human figures may also be read in terms of renewal: while war entails death, nature and ancient Eastern wisdom hold the potential for regeneration, new life may sprout even from the finest root fibres.

While these photo-based serigraphs are also represented in other collections (for instance, the Hunya and the Szalóky Collections), several additional photo-derived graphic series from the early 1980s have yet to be publicly exhibited. The most dramatic of these builds upon documentary photographs of the 1932 Ukrainian Holodomor, the mass famine provoked by Soviet collectivization. The party secretary of the Art Academy was aware that the student was working with these deeply unsettling and politically sensitive images; it remains unclear how the production of the prints was permitted. By the artist’s own decision, they have remained in storage ever since.

Over the past thirty-five years, the friendship and professional collaboration between János Szirtes and Károly Szalóky have shaped a complex and multifaceted process of artistic canonization. As a gallerist, Szalóky has incorporated significant works from nearly every major phase of the artist’s career into his own collection, which he has preserved to this day, making him the principal collector and interpreter of Szirtes’s oeuvre. The collection has become a fundamental point of reference for the curatorial vision and values of the Várfok Gallery. Encompassing numerous works by other artists of the gallery as well, the collection functions both as a commemorative book and a living archive, with its new exhibition of 35 works marking the 35^th anniversary of the gallery.

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