A mixture of paintings based on historical, personal and commercial photos about Berlin

A Painterly Exploration of German Identity and Didactics

Der Die Das Dés” – the title plays with German grammar, symbolizing the complexity of language and the fragmentation of identity.

As a Hungarian, I often perceive myself as a kind of “error” within this system—someone who only partially understands and integrates German grammar and its way of thinking. This experience shapes my artistic perspective: I observe German culture and identity both from close up (frog’s-eye view) and from a critical distance (bird’s-eye view).

The starting point for this series was a collection of German learning books I acquired to learn the language. Yet my attention was drawn less to the text and more to the imagery. These books, mostly printed in the 1990s and early 2000s, have a distinct visual and didactic style that inspired me to experiment with them through painting.

The textbooks contain exercises that often feel surreal, accompanied by stiff, banal photo illustrations reminiscent of generic stock photography. These images depict stereotypical everyday scenes—waiting for the bus, eating breakfast, going to the cinema, drinking coffee, learning German. They serve as cultural representations, often impersonal and cliché-ridden.

My goal was to transform these visual clichés through painterly interventions—infused with humility, irony, and collage. I also playfully incorporated fragments of the textbook texts—sometimes intact, sometimes broken apart—to add layers of meaning.

The resulting works function as paintings, yet they also appear “useful” due to the embedded didactic elements. This absurd blend of beauty and instructional content creates a visual tension: once the texts lose their original context, they become lines, colors, structures, rhythms—integrated into a painterly composition that balances between illustration, conceptual art, and visual poetry. The works oscillate between observation and commentary, between humble depiction and free interpretation.

selected paintings 2008- 2018.