The exhibition brings together the unique visions of four contemporary artists—István Máriás aka Horror Pista, József Pinczés, Miklós Soltis, and Géza Szöllősi. All of them reinterpret the tradition of surrealism using a variety of media, exploring the unconscious, the transitions between dream and reality, as well as the visual world of games, fairy tales, comics, films, and video games, and the experience of eerie strangeness.
Nightmare Pop thus evokes the artistic movement of pop surrealism (lowbrow art) that emerged at the end of the 20th century, combining motifs from popular culture with the dreamlike imagery of surrealism. While classical surrealism, following Freud, focused on the hidden contents of the unconscious and the power of dreams, pop surrealists took up the banner of criticism of modern society, highlighting the absurdities and contradictions of consumption, identity, and technology. The exhibition Nightmare Pop is located at the intersection of these two trends, drawing simultaneously on archetypal images from the collective unconscious and the garish world of pop culture, which is thus grotesque and poetic, playful and unsettling.
István Máriás, aka Horror Pista, addresses social and historical contradictions, the search for Eastern European identity, post-socialist existence, and the kitsch phenomena of Asian and Chinese markets and restaurants in his acrylic-oil-on-canvas paintings and ceramic tile pictures, which are characterized by absurd humor. The figures, animal characters, and various creatures depicted appear in surreal, ironic, or distorted contexts in his works.
The lyrical paintings and graphics created by József Pinczés together with his young son open up a meditative dimension, with blurred figures and faces hovering on the border between visibility and concealment. The images convey a sense of uncertainty and unsettling mystery, telling stories of unconscious processes, changes, and personal histories.
Miklós Soltis’ conceptual and intermedia works reflect on contemporary consumer society and the state of humanity, its anxieties, and its search for identity. His surreal figures often appear disguised as toys or comic book heroes, locked in display cases or accompanied by ironic commentary. His pop-cultural spectacles can also be understood as a kind of ontological research, combining childlike fantasy and adult consciousness.
Géza Szöllősi’s pop culture hybrids—his chitin-armored robot insects—were born out of the deprivation of his childhood in the 1980s, which the artist created himself from tropical beetles. These DIY yet professional-looking “psychomutants” are inhabitants of a collective dream world, who are both threatening and attractive. Szöllősi’s works occupy the borderland where the organic and the inorganic, the human and the mechanical merge.