Mátyás Erményi

Mátyás Erményi’s oeuvre revolves around the fields of drawing and painting. His playfully figurative paintings, drawn from the world of cartoons and illustrated fairy tales, re-interprets Eastern European object culture and visuality by transforming each of his protagonists into the foundations of a private mythology.

Erményi’s practice is primarily inspired by Eastern European animated films that fundamentally shaped the cultural aesthetics of several generations across the region, such as the Polish Bolek i Lolek, the famous Krtek (The Mole), or the tale of the Hungarian fox cub, Vuk. It is this very specific cultural legacy that informs Erményi’s varying cast of personified subjects – from huge tree trunks full of burrow-like holes, to his newly appearing cockle stoves, cobwebs and stormy skies – which are then brought to life via his frame-in-frame, drawing-like compositions that blends his hitherto purely cartoon-like figuration with instinctively developed abstract geometric patterns. His works reveal fragments and the object culture of the symbolic past from a child’s perspective, without seeking to evoke feelings of nostalgia. The basic set of emotional associations in these paintings are based on ambivalent dichotomies, in which feelings of kindness and fear, cuteness and melancholy are simultaneously present.

Mátyás Erményi (b. 1992, Hungary) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. Following his graduation from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2017 with a master’s degree in painting, Erményi’s has held solo and group exhibitions at acb Gallery, Hungary; New Irokéz Gallery, Hungary; and MODEM Modern and Contemporary Arts Centre, Hungary, among others.