Botond Keresztesi

Botond Keresztesi’s (b.1987, Romania-Hungary) paintings strike a more playful, figurative tone. His creations are futuro-nostalgic still lives, assembled from diverse objectual histories from mainstream digital culture through classical art history to the landscape and monuments of his childhood in a Post-Socialist minor town in Romania. His frequent use of coded abbreviations as exhibition titles with cheeky double-entendres reflect the ironic, subversive undertone to his practice, such as the recent The Opium Smoker's Dream at The Hole in New York and Machines With Love at Longtermhandstand in Budapest. His striking paintings merge different motifs and subcultural fetish objects from real and fictional culture, such as Lara Croft, lava lamps, details from Hieronymus Bosch and Caravaggio works, famous Hungarian Zsolnay porcelain figures, surveillance cameras and iPhones. These composite bodies present a kind of trans-evolutionary profile of human obsession and idolized junk. The digital surface effect of the paintings themselves speaks to the hollow, postmodern realm of cultural iconography, accelerated by digital culture. 

Keresztesi engages with the symbolic and mythical world as one that’s constantly recycled, whether through art, cinema, technology or collective consciousness and libido. He pastiches various cultural signifiers in order to confront the viewer with the cultural relativity of sacred forms and objects, including the fragments of his own nostalgic vocabulary.

EDUCATION

2007 – 2012 Hungarian University of Fine Arts / Painting
2011 Universität Leipzig / Erasmus, Leipzig

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 

Solo and Duo Exhibitions

2023 „The garden of the magician”, Double Q, Hong Kong
2023 Dungeon Keepers (with Stach Szumszki), Piana Gallery, Krakow
2023 Dorsia (with Kristóf Lázár), ENA Viewing Space, Budapest
2022 „The Opium Smoker’s Dream”, The Hole, New York
2022 „Machines With Love”, Longtermhandstand, Budapest
2022 Brother Moon, Sister Sun (with Ádám Horváth), Future Gallery, Berlin

Group

2023 Frontal Sphinx, Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo
2023 Voracity Loop, Platform, Stockholm
2023 Ya Laytani, Place of Wishes, Salalah
2023 F.I.R.E - Flames In Readymade Entertainment, Longtermhandstand, Budapest
2023 X Pink 101, X Museum, Beijing
2023 Permutations, Odem Ateliers, Stockholm
2022 New Mediations/Új Közvetítések, MODEM, Debrecen
2022 Newtro, Everyday Gallery, Antwerp
2022 Ereklye,Haydnkopf, Tihanyi Bencés Apátság, Tihany
2022 Different Solar Settings, DK Gallery, London
2022 Stories We Live With, Q Contemporary, Budapest
2022 XY, Rundgænger by Schierke Seinecke, Frankfurt

Date of residency: 19.1.2024 – 24.2.2024