The artists participating in this new group exhibition—Benyó Dóra, Kovács Olívia, Elizabeth de Vaal, and Zékány Dia—have chosen the title Behind the Curtain as the guiding theme for their collective body of work. While diverse in both subject and medium, the exhibition ultimately converges around contemporary figurative painting. This title immediately brings to mind the intersection of personal and collective memory, as well as the dialectical relationship between cultural remembrance and forgetting.

In a way, one could say that the common denominator of the works on display—their lowest common multiple—is none other than the veil of memory, or rather, the curtain itself, and what lies beyond it: the problem of forgetting. Since the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, we have understood that forgetting is not merely an act of omission but a fundamental existential question—a problem of being that has shaped Western philosophy. According to Heidegger, the entire history of Western thought is essentially a narrative of the failure to grasp the essence of being, a grand story of Seinsvergessenheit—the forgetting of being. Yet, this notion of forgetting already contains an inherent paradox: we can only forget what we once knew, making knowledge and ignorance inseparable.

This same duality is at play in the works presented here. A striking example is the monumental cotton canvas painting by Benyó Dóra, a Hungarian-born artist who grew up in the Netherlands and now resides in Brussels. Her piece is suspended across the exhibition space, revealing its reverse side—the very back of the painting. Inspired by archival photographs, the actual image is on the other side of the fabric, where the diluted acrylic paint bleeds through, dissolving into abstract, ephemeral memory fragments. This thematic exploration extends to Benyó’s other paintings and her installation of clay fragments that mimic bronze artifacts. Her work functions as a kind of collective investigation, where the artist—searching for traces of her own grandfather in photographs from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—ultimately compels us to confront the constructed nature of our own political and historical memory.

A similar investigative approach can be found in the works of Kovács Olívia. Here, too, we witness an act of cosmic detection, but one in which the veil conceals the contours of a deeply personal tragedy. This is most vividly embodied in her video installation, which runs inside a black box reminiscent of an aircraft’s indestructible flight recorder—urging the viewer into an unsettling act of voyeurism. Her paintings, depicting ghostly, forensic-like examinations of domestic spaces, capture the spectral presence of family homes. At the same time, they bear the imprint of the painting process itself. Kovács introduces a unique twist: within the figurative compositions, she incorporates pointillist brushstrokes along the margins—almost like a visual footnote or commentary. These tiny dots of oil paint, typically reserved for mixing on a palette, become an integral part of the image itself.

Elizabeth de Vaal’s paintings seem to fuse these two artistic approaches. Her works feature silhouettes of cars filled with abstract painterly gestures that mimic the reverse side of folk-art textiles adorned with floral motifs. Originally from the Netherlands, de Vaal has lived for nearly two decades in Pécsbagota, a small village near Pécs, Hungary. This long-term immersion has led her to explore the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit)—a term coined by Sigmund Freud to describe the eerie coexistence of the familiar and the alien. According to Freud, the uncanny arises when something long-repressed resurfaces, haunting us like a ghostly return of the same. In de Vaal’s paintings, traditional Hungarian embroidery patterns—ubiquitous in rural interiors—become emblems of this experience, serving as a wellspring of artistic inspiration. This fascination extends beyond her canvases to her installations featuring embroidered pillows and bedsheets. The car itself, a recurring motif in her work, embodies the perpetual movement between two worlds—between The Hague and Pécsbagota, between home and otherness, between the known and the foreign.

A similar paradox between motion and stasis emerges in the paintings of Zékány Dia. Her works exemplify a masterful blend of social voyeurism and painterly virtuosity. In these hyperrealist depictions, the chaotic interiors of cluttered garages, sheds, and storage spaces seem to pulsate with restless energy. The oppressive realism of these overfilled spaces is counterbalanced by dynamic brushstrokes that propel the viewer’s gaze into a staccato-like visual rhythm. By presenting disorder and chaos as meticulously composed artistic tableaux, Zékány transforms mundane spaces into grand total-installations, revealing the complex, often contradictory relationship between people and their environments.

It is perhaps no coincidence that this tension between order and chaos, between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces, brings to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche, drawing on the Hindu concept of Māyā, describes reality as an illusionary veil—much like the curtain in this exhibition. He writes: "Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, every person no longer feels merely reconciled, pacified, and unified with their fellow human beings, but truly one with them—as if Māyā’s veil had been torn apart and now fluttered in shreds before the primordial unity. [...] The individual is no longer an artist; they have become a work of art. The entire creative force of nature reveals itself through them, sculpting the human form in its highest ecstasy, as if the Dionysian world-artist were striking its chisel in rhythm with the cries of the Eleusinian Mysteries: ‘Do you sense the Creator, O World?’”

The exhibition is available for viewing with prior registration until March 28. [email protected]; +36 70 652 3040