Imre Bukta: Extinct rural animals

One of the most influential masters of contemporary Hungarian fine art, also significant from an international perspective, lives and works in the village of Mezőszemere in Heves County. Imre Bukta (1952) has participated several times in the Venice Biennale, exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial, and his works have been shown, among others, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Bozar in Brussels, the Art Mill in Szentendre, the Landesmuseum in Linz, the Art Museum in Jyväskylä, the Kunsthall in Lund, and the Millennium Museum in Beijing. His first retrospective exhibition was organized by MODEM in Debrecen in 2008. This was followed by major survey exhibitions in 2012 at Műcsarnok, in 2019 at Kieselbach Gallery, and in 2022 at the Godot Institute, each accompanied by significant publications. Since 2004, Imre Bukta has been represented by Godot Gallery.

His career began as a self-taught artist in the 1970s. His art is deeply connected to the lifestyle and culture of rural Hungarians working in agriculture. From the beginning, his themes have been drawn from the objects, locations, and figures of everyday working life. To depict these, he freely uses a wide variety of natural materials in his paintings (hair, wood, corn, tiles, matchsticks, etc.), assembling them in an almost assemblage-like manner. In his objects, installations, and performances, he naturally juxtaposes everyday tools of peasant material culture or constructs unique image-machine structures from them. His portraits, compositions, and scenes can be understood as special sociological studies; however, unlike the detached and analytical outsider’s perspective, Bukta sees and presents this distinctive, bittersweet world from within. His approach is at times ironic, melancholic, socially critical, or permissive, but always marked by exceptional empathy toward his subjects.

Bukta’s newest paintings (2025–26) focus on domestic and field animals once characteristic of the Hungarian countryside — and, of course, on us, contemporary people. What would it be like to encounter a cow walking home on a beautiful rural evening, or a pig happily wallowing in the mud? In the village where the artist lives, there is no longer a single cow, yet he works in a former cowshed — its aura is unavoidable. Different scents, different smells, sounds, different people. Deeply embedded childhood memories merge on the canvases with the realism of today. Visitors entering the Godot Gallery will encounter richly innovative, masterful works with a distinctive atmosphere.