Luca Pataki's solo exhibition curated by Ágnes Keszegh at Liget Gallery in Budapest.
Luca Pataki: How to Kill an Artist?
11 September – 17 October 2025
Curated by Ágnes Keszegh
Liget Gallery, Budapest
How to Kill an Artist? is an exhibition that poses an answer to this very question, engaging both ontological and social dimensions: What is an artist? Who is an artist? And what does it mean to “kill”?
Pataki’s oeuvre is defined by a network of motifs: the house, the self-portrait, the labyrinth, and confrontation. Although she works with diverse techniques and materials, since January 2020 her practice has been inseparable from the so-called five-minute drawings. These spontaneous, often involuntary gestures manifest as webs of lines, appearing as momentary imprints of the subconscious and inner emotions. In her practice, drawing becomes a medium of metamorphosis and of perpetual self-overwriting.
The house, as a symbol of the inner self and of home, appears in alternating forms: sometimes playfully moving on rolling legs, sometimes sprawling in fragments as if swept by a whirlwind. At times it emerges as a sealed unit, elsewhere turned inside out or appearing only in fragments sketched across the paper. Now, in the gallery space, Pataki has enveloped objects such as a table, chair, and easel in black within the framework of an public performance. The drawings, spread across the floor, unfold like an organic carpet in contrast to the blackened fragments of objects.
Here, black is not merely the color of mourning, but simultaneously that of beginning and end: the heir to Caravaggio’s dramatic chiaroscuro and the “zero point” of Malevich’s Black Square, which eliminates all narrative and, through its sheer presence, forces confrontation. In her performance, Pataki confronted herself, experiencing the gesture of annihilation through becoming one with the act of creation. Death, particularly self-death, returns throughout Pataki’s work as a fever-dream-like concept. The exploding, disintegrating forms of the five-minute drawings capture the liminal state between dissolution and rebirth.
The house and the self-portrait often appear fragmented, bearing the trauma of a split self, then reconfigure into organic shapes that evolve into labyrinthine spatial structures. The labyrinth here is not merely a motif, but a state of being: a trace of inner wandering, into which one awakens suddenly and from which escape seems nearly impossible. This sense of labyrinthine ordered chaos permeates the gallery space as well. Through her own person, Pataki invites the viewer into an unsolvable riddle, where the “killer” is always hidden in the details.
Thus the exhibition functions not only as an individual act of self-examination but also as a collective confrontation: an experience of the cycle of disappearance and rebirth. On the wall, a series recalls fourteen stations of a personal life journey, drawing a parallel to Joseph Beuys’s 1979 Guggenheim installation, a paraphrase of the Stations of the Cross. Pataki juxtaposes elements from her earlier works, projects conceived for this exhibition, and possible answers implied by its title with the Passion narrative. The series halts at Golgotha, where the narrative remains unresolved. This absence itself becomes a statement: the death of the artist is not an end, but an interminable in-between state.
The final element in this sequence is the publication and the revelatory file, around which certain “witnesses” construct additional perspectives.
Luca Pataki (1999, Budapest) lives and works in Dresden and Budapest. Her work is inspired by self-examination, the exploration of the subconscious and the labyrinth motif, in search of both personal and universal questions. Often, the basis of her practice is the so-called “five-minute drawings” which form a complex network of notions consisting of more than a thousand sketches. Her themes include automatism, duality, puzzle-like structures and struggle, which she simultaneously approaches through intuitive and conceptual methods. In 2022, she earned an MA in Painting from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. During her studies, while exploring the boundaries of the picture plane, her work gradually expanded to include drawing, digital and installation elements. Between 2020 and 2021, she studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden on an Erasmus scholarship, and from 2022 to 2023 she participated in an Erasmus+ traineeship in Berlin. In parallel, in 2022 she contributed as coordinator and educator to the documenta15 CAMP Notes on Education project, joining through Tímea Pók’s Blossom project, which focused on social sensitivity.
In 2025, she received the Robert Sterl Prize, resulting in her next solo exhibition opening at the end of October. In 2023, she returned to the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden for postgraduate studies with the support of a DAAD scholarship. She was awarded the Ludwig Foundation Prize in 2021 and the Barcsay Prize in 2018. Since 2022, she has been a member of FKSE (Studio of Young Artists’ Association) and the organiser and participant of numerous further projects, such as the EU4art international collaboration. She regularly participates in solo and group exhibitions both in Hungary and internationally. In 2024 her first international solo exhibition, titled, Idea was presented.
Publication With Works And Text From:
Zsófia Antalka, Paul Barsch, Barnabás Bácsi, Robin Goldbach, Lena Horn, Júlia Kerekes, Olga Kocsi, Botond Keresztesi, Ágnes Keszegh, Virginia Lorenzetti, Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss, Tímea Pók, Sandro Prodonovic, Márk Rékai, Lydia Smith, Patrick Tayler, Andrea Szilák, Zoltán Visnyai, Georg Winter
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