Works by the exhibiting independent artists will become available for purchase through the Start Gallery Budapest webshop starting July 1. Until then, reservation requests may be sent to: 📩 angelika@startgaleria.hu
A curated presentation of emerging contemporary artworks, showcasing fresh voices from the new generation of the Hungarian contemporary art scene.
Exhibiting Artists
Lili Lehotay Boglárka Szabó Hanna Sáfrány Szabó Beatrix Zsiros Masa Aliz Kovács Judit Földy Lili Sulyok Anna Eszter Setényi Maja Berczeli Léna Székely
As part of the exhibition, the works of Brigitta B. Horváth are presented alongside selected contemporary artworks by Start Gallery Budapest artists Gábor Tobak and Angelika Fekete (Analóg Angelika). Through this dialogue between artists, the exhibition explores how the wabi-sabi philosophy represented by Horváth in Hungary inspires creators across related artistic disciplines.
The exhibition creates an intimate encounter between imperfection, fragility, atmosphere, and contemporary visual culture—highlighting how Japanese-inspired aesthetics can resonate within the language of independent contemporary art in Budapest, Hungary.
Founded in December 2021, Start Gallery Budapest is a community-based contemporary commercial gallery and creative space dedicated to promoting artistic practice, supporting emerging independent artists through first solo exhibitions, and reviving a civic art collecting culture through accessible contemporary artwork, sketches, studies, and works by new voices entering the art market.
B. Horváth Brigitta Analóg AngelikaB. Horváth BrigittaAnalóg AngelikaB. Horváth BrigittaAnalóg Angelika
Brigitta B. Horváth has spent nearly thirty years researching the organic forms of plants and translating these observations into the field of contemporary metal and jewelry art. Working within this artistic philosophy, she creates applied art objects inspired by botanical structures, drawing not only from her own studies of nature, but also from the iconic bud photographs of Karl Blossfeldt and the visual world of Katsushika Hokusai.
Last year, Horváth received an individual artist grant from the Hungarian National Cultural Fund, which enabled the creation of a new jewelry collection inspired by the principles of mokume-gane and the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. For decades, themes of metamorphosis and transformation have remained central to her practice. Through close observation of natural processes, she explores how life emerges from seemingly lifeless matter, seeking to guide her own works—whether sculptures, jewelry pieces, or handcrafted lamps—through similar formal evolutions.
Her contemporary artworks merge organic sensitivity with functional design, creating objects that carry both poetic and everyday presence.
Gábor Tobak was invited to continue his long-standing artistic exploration of impermanence and the fragile beauty of natural decay. Following the debut group exhibition, new works from the series—highly anticipated by collectors—will be presented at Start Gallery Budapest during the winter season of 2022.
In his untitled series, Tobak frames fragments of aged wooden objects, weathered beams, and worn rural ceiling structures, elevating the textures of decay, erosion, and time into autonomous contemporary artworks. Through these carefully selected materials, he reveals the quiet dignity and visual richness hidden within deterioration itself.
For more than twenty years, Tobak has continuously redefined his relationship with wood as a material, searching for ways to express his deepest respect for the natural world through contemporary artistic practice in Budapest, Hungary.
Gábor Tobak
Angelika Fekete (Analóg Angelika)’s introspective paintings are deeply personal attempts to confront reality with honesty and directness—something rarely achievable within the rhythms of everyday life. Built through repetitive gestures and meditative processes, her contemporary artworks seek to dissolve seemingly fixed situations and interrupt the instinctive “autopilot mode” through which we often navigate daily existence.
Within her artistic philosophy, things possess no inherent value in themselves; value is compulsively projected onto them by consciousness. This tension—between how reality is imagined to be and how it is actually experienced—becomes one of the central sources of suffering. Learning to peacefully inhabit the distance between imagined and lived reality is, for the artist, one of the highest forms of freedom. The perfection of imperfection becomes liberation itself.
Wabi-Sabi: The Beauty of Imperfection
Contemporary Art Exhibition in Budapest, Hungary
📍 Start Gallery Budapest 15–17 Margit Boulevard, Budapest, Hungary
📅 Planned opening: September 22, 2022 – 6:00 PM
Opening speech by László Sári, orientalist and researcher of Eastern cultures. Live performance by Afronauta Handpan Artist.
The exhibition explores the philosophy of Wabi-Sabi—the beauty found within irregularity, imperfection, fragility, and transience. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, Wabi-Sabi has evolved into one of the defining concepts of Japanese aesthetics:
“Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”
Wabi is often associated with rustic simplicity and restrained elegance, applicable both to natural forms and human-made objects. Sabi, meanwhile, refers to the discovery of beauty through aging and imperfection—the quiet poetry formed through the passage of time.
The exhibition reflects on nature’s endless cycles of transformation: the tree growing from a seed, expanding into a vast canopy, eventually falling, being repurposed into homes and objects, then slowly decaying once again. Fragments drift through rivers, weather under sun and rain, and gradually transform into organically sculpted structures of breathtaking irregularity.
This same worldview is embodied in the jewelry pieces created using the ancient Japanese mokume-gane technique, where layered metals fuse together in wood-grain-like patterns through a hidden and highly complex process. These objects carry the spirit of continuously transforming nature—where everything is interconnected, and even the smallest plant reveals deeper truths through its silent language.
Artists Featured
Brigitta B. Horváth
Angelika Fekete (Analóg Angelika)
Gábor Tobak
About Start Gallery
Start Gallery is a contemporary community-commercial gallery and creative space dedicated to supporting independent artists, first solo exhibitions, and accessible contemporary artwork for emerging collectors.
February 4, 2023 – 5:00 PM | Contemporary Group Exhibition in Budapest, Hungary
The atmosphere of the simple black-lettered NICE TO SEE YOU stickers instantly evokes the early 2000s. Their black-framed typography on white backgrounds recalls the cheerful slogans, comic-style speech bubbles, and rounded television aesthetics of the era. At the same time, they can also be interpreted as friendly public-space interventions resisting the monotony of turn-of-the-millennium urban life.
Yet what feels simultaneously familiar and strangely alien is not the graphic design itself, but the directness, simplicity, and optimism of the message—the atmosphere these works create.
Art writer Zsolt Miklósvölgyi connects the exhibition concept to Endre Tót’s Joys series from the 1970s, works that reflected the oppressive conditions of their time through an “absurd euphoria of joy.” In distant kinship with Tót’s visual language, the NICE TO SEE YOU statements can also be seen as reflections of a fading era—one increasingly obscured by the conditions of dystopian realism and illiberal everyday life.
Rather than responding with nostalgia, however, the artworks presented here attempt to reactivate the simple, positive, and universally accessible spirit embodied by the black-and-white stickers.
A collective exhibition exploring memory, optimism, urban culture, and contemporary visual language through the works of emerging and established independent artists in Budapest, Hungary.
Participating Artists
Péter Andráskó Tibor Árki Soma Balázs Tamás Blaha Márton Dés Ilka Fedor Dániel Ferencz Márk Fridvalszki Tamás Füredi Tibor Horváth Roland Horváth Dani Jancsó Simon Kaci Anna Kasnyik Botond Keresztesi Adél Koleszár Lehel Kovács János Kummer Balázs Lobot Dani Lődőr Gábor Magolcsay Nagy Sophia Mohamed Richárd Orosz Theodora Pásztor Krisztián Peer Attila Stark Szárnyas Doboz Gergő Szinyova Mihály Szuharevszki Diána Tamási Lázár Todoroff Sára Hanna Topor Dominika Trapp Krisztián Vörös Piros
