ADRIENN ERDEI

Shadow work, 2025.

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At the school where I teach, every year we create performances, actions, and installations following the work of Miklós Erdély and the INDIGO group (which was the subject of my teaching thesis). This year, following Erdély’s spirit, I also participated in the actions. Everyone prepared an individual piece on a commonly chosen theme. In my performance, dressed in black and standing on a white drape, I read aloud an excerpt from Carl Gustav Jung’s Thoughts on Nature to my own reflection, which deals with Jung’s views on shadow work.

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A Flowers I-II. egy digitális festménysorozat. Az ismétlődés témáját veti fel a mára már elhasználódott virág motívumán keresztül. A festményen a modellem egy művirág volt, amely a festés folyamata során elvesztette a megkülönböztethetőségét egy valódi virágtól, ezzel olyan kérdéseket felvetve, hogy mi a valóság, vagy mi látszik valóságosnak.

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Flowers I-II is a digital painting series. It explores the theme of repetition through the flower motif, which by now has become a worn-out cliché. My model for the painting was an artificial flower that, during the process of painting, lost its distinguishability from a real one—thereby raising questions about what is reality and what merely appears to be real.

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Az alábbi PDF file-ban olyan, még el nem készült vagy már el sem készítendő alkotásaim terve van (pályázati anyag), amit mégis fontosnak tartok megosztani. A 2025-26-os időszakom tervezett, de el nem készült munkái, amik kiegészítik a megvalósult munkáim olvasatát, a gondolataimat A szövegek magyarul olvashatók benne.

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The following PDF contains plans for works of mine that are yet to be realized or may never be completed (application material), yet I find it important to share them. These are the planned but unexecuted works from the 2025-26 period, which complement the interpretation of my finished projects and my thoughts. The texts therein are available in Hungarian.

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The paintings titled “Big Odalisque“ essentially belong to my “Torso” series, as the composition is cropped in a way that the entire body is not visible. Within the composition, the woman is not ill at ease; however, the viewer is placed in the role of a voyeur. This visually manifests a sense of vulnerability and helplessness before the gaze—a concept I interpret both psychologically and compositionally.

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The inspiration for the Torso II series is the painting titled “Show-Hide (Torso II/1)”, in which one half depicts a curtain and the other a female upper body. This duality of revelation and concealment (showing and hiding) runs throughout the painting. (I painted this piece during/immediately after the series titled “View”, which features views from windows—or more accurately, the “lack of views,” as they are obscured by curtains.) The torso-like cropping refers to the objectification of the female body and its vulnerability. Additionally, some paintings in the series feature a frame-like crop, through which I reference both physical and psychological boundaries.

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In this series of paintings, naked female torsos appear in the same compositional framing: from the neck down to the mons pubis, with bare breasts, cropped at the arms. Technically, the first piece of the series, Torso I/1, is still realistic, while the subsequent paintings are much rawer, more instinctive, and more expressive. This duality can be seen as the manifestation of the inner self and the psyche through matter; they are memento-like articulations of vulnerability, victimhood, objectification, or abuse—reflecting the psychological breaking of a woman.

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The series, consisting of twelve relatively small-scale paintings, is composed of loosely interpreted, subjective circular associations.

The drain, the basin, the egg, the skull, the lampshade, the toilet bowl, and the ring—all embody circularity. The circle can be a sign of totality and infinite freedom, or a never-ending trap and perpetual repetition.

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In the short art animation titled “Concreting”, a figure is seen mixing concrete. Sand, cement, water, and physical labor are the elements used to create the material. As the events unfold, it soon becomes clear that the work is being performed by an almost entirely naked female figure. By concreting herself—as if constructing a pedestal for a statue—she is working on her own encasement in concrete. The “statue” thus serves as a monument to eternity.

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In the painting, one of Budapest’s red-light districts (tolerance zones) serves as the background, while the subjects of the work are figures of the Venus de Milo, multiplied and depicted in foreshortening. In the Greek era, with few exceptions, women possessed no real rights; nevertheless, statues of Venus have come to symbolize idealized femininity. These statues standing by the roadside refer to what is often called “the world’s oldest profession”—prostitution. Waiting by the side of the road, these Venus torsos are foreshortened to the point of infinity.

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From time to time, a specific object gains prominence in my work—typically items drawn from my personal environment. At the same time, an intuitive creative process remains essential to me. In these three works, the “basin” emerges as a recurring motif.

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Narcissus is a frequent theme in art; in the well-known mythological story, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection. However, the painting does not only react to this myth but also to narcissistic personality disorder, a term so prevalent today that it has become a common, often arbitrary self-diagnosis in everyday language.

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The theme of concealment and hiding appears in various ways across several of my works. Often, a figure’s face is obscured, or—as in the case of the painting titled “Walled-up Window”—the inhabitant of the house has excluded themselves, hiding behind the bricks. In the work titled “View”, the viewer is placed in the role of a voyeur, yet this is the moment just before looking out. It captures the uncertainty of whether or not to pull back the curtain and face what lies beyond. Visually, there is a contradiction between the title and the subject matter: through the drawn curtain, only a blurred image emerges—metaphorically representing hopelessness, and the tension between hope and despair.

The work titled “View” has evolved into a smaller series.

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In the painting titled “Minotaur,” we see a male figure wearing a goat mask in a half-length portrait composition. According to Greek mythology, the Minotaur is a half-human, half-bull creature to whom virgins were sacrificed. The goat mask is deceptive and absurd; the title catches the viewer off guard, as the name and the visual image are only loosely connected through allusion.

Regarding an earlier painting of mine, “Biting Dog,” I wrote that the dog is, in a sense, a manifestation of a narcissistic being, as its gaze is human. We are faced with something similar in the case of the “Minotaur”: he is a “negative hero” (anti-hero) who evokes concepts such as domination, the monster, evil, or the scapegoat (…).

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In my work, I process the visual environment that surrounds me. At times, my focus is on clearly articulable narratives; at others, I engage with impressions, sensations, or associations, always prioritizing a psychological approach. I often leave room for visual or interpretive paradoxes, using them to point toward a deeper underlying content.

In my Hospital series (2020–2021), I created compositions by extracting elements from a clinical environment, focusing on specific objects as if they were portraits. Without the titles, one might not even recognize them as “medical case records.” These paintings were based on photographs of artificial flowers, wall hangings, and printed reproductions of famous paintings found on hospital walls. In these reproductions, their age is evident—they are faded copies. On the hospital walls, a sharp, horizontal dark line separates the emulsion paint from the industrial oil-based paint, evoking the atmosphere of the 1980s and 90s for many of us. Although I have recently had to spend more time in hospitals than expected, these images do not directly recount my personal medical history. Rather, I aimed to evoke the “hospital atmosphere” and, with it, concepts such as illness, trouble, and the sense that “something is not right.”