Botond Keresztesi & Stach Szumski: Dungeon Keepers

Exhibition of artists Botond Keresztesi & Stach Szumski titled Dungeon Keepers: Earlier than Primordial Middle Ages.

Look at the surface in front of you. Signs and evidence of a particular historical style accumulate until they become an overwhelming polyphony of visual elements. Instead of referring to a specific historical epoch, they create a shroud densely filled with ornamentation and period detail. Is there anyone who has the ability to distinguish one layer from another? Who can identify and separate them, much as one separates the skin from the juicy pomegranate seeds? The dungeon guards surgically construct an unknown world that never existed. By combining different layers of historical content, they bring to life a wild mix of immersive realities that coexist in the spacious hall of the Kostka Gallery.

The joint Polish-Hungarian exhibition of the two artists follows their recent collaborative project Dungeon Keepers in Krakow, Poland. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the MeetFactory residency program.

Botond Keresztesi (born in 1987 in Romania) – A Hungarian multimedia artist expressing himself in painting, drawing and installation. A graduate of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest (2007–2012), his work deals with references to art history, pop culture, the digital world and the everyday, which crystallize into fragmented surreal landscapes in his paintings. Keresztesi’s recent solo and group exhibitions include Galerie Deroullion in Paris, Carl Kostyal in Malmö, Future Gallery in Berlin, the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, and Schloss Castle in Oslo. In the Czech Republic, he has so far had only one solo exhibition, presented in 2021 at the former Lítost Gallery.

Stach Szumski (born in 1992 in Gdańsk) – Graduated from the Faculty of Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He works with painting, installations, sculptures, graphics, drawings and interventions in public space. Influenced by grassroots practices related to post-graffiti, in 2013–2016 he co-directed Warsaw's V9 gallery. In addition, in 2015–2020 he collaborated with Karolina Mełnicka on the Nomadic State project, in which he created an art collective and a fictional nomadic microstate. Szumski’s works have been exhibited in various galleries around the world, including CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Kyoto Art Center and Galeria Parcel in Tokyo. He undertakes large-scale murals and interdisciplinary projects, often based on historical research during his extensive travels. He lives and works in Michałowice (Karkonosze). In the Czech Republic, he has so far had a solo exhibition at the Berlin Model Gallery in 2022.

Production: Petra Widžová
Graphic: Jan Arndt