DrMáriás plays devil’s advocate at new Godot show

Walking into the current exhibition at the Godot Gallery – which entails entering the side door of the buzzy Moha Café and heading up the back stairs – throws you into a riot of manipulated discombobulation.


It’s not just the assault of striking colours, adding drama to Mickey Mouse training his machine gun on a rosy-cheeked Hungarian hussar, but the juxtaposition of familiar faces and works of art. Stalin waves by the side of David Hockney’s pool, Lady Di and Gorbachëv shoot the breeze in Edward Hopper’s diner, and Hungary’s Communist leader János Kádár fails to crack a Giaconda smile.

All in a day’s work for drMáriás. Former graduate of the Belgrade Faculty of Fine Arts, this Vojvodina-born malcontent has been active in Budapest since 1991. Along with fronting alt-rock troubadours Tudósok, drMáriás created a particular style of painting reliant on his deep knowledge of art and his biting disdain for political leaders past and present in a region still tainted with the epithet of Eastern Europe.

It’s also absolutely hilarious. “So this,” says drMáriás, presenting the aforementioned painting Enjoy Your Swim, Comrade! “…is Stalin as if he were David Hockney’s ex-lover Peter Schlesinger”. The 1972 original sold for $90.3 million in 2018, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist.


This matters little to drMáriás. What he revels in, knowledgeably, is the back story – Schlesinger in his red jacket, the romantic tension between the teenage muse and his new-found beau – and then adapting it to a multi-tiered portrayal of Eastern-European reality:

This is one of three drMáriás works whose originals are now showing at the New Hungarian Anti-Democratic Art running concurrently at the ’89 Gallery in London.


Another is an even more familiar. Rehashed far too many times, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper is here portrayed as Lady Di and Mikhail Gorbachëv convening after a night out at Budapest’s legendary underground club of the early 1990s, the Tilos Az Á.

There was, in fact, an all-night confectionery near the Tilos where many gathered before dawn, as drMáriás well remembers, but here the iconic figureheads of the UK and the USSR are discussing the rights and wrongs of Hungary gaining its freedom after the Fall of Communism.

This is also the main theme of Péter Weiler’s ironic retrospective, It Would Have Been a Pity to Defect, currently showing at Kincsem Palace. He and drMáriás share the New Hungarian Anti-Democratic Art exhibition at the ’89 Gallery in Covent Garden.

While the London show is more universal in its approach, the bulk of the 20 paintings here at the Godot hone in on aspects of life particular to Hungary. School reunions, for example, a near obligatory social occasion for Magyars, are depicted by drMáriás in terms of the inevitable subject matter of the conversation.


In fact, the Hungarian Prime Minister crops up in portrait form in many places: 42 times across the back wall of the gallery. This montage, titled One Vision after the bombastic Queen song, also features the logos of the multinationals who backed the current government, re-elected this spring.

Keeping things current, drMáriás also addresses the conflict in Ukraine, his visions of warplanes and po-faced leaders perhaps not a million miles away from his experiences in former Yugoslavia before he discovered his niche as cultural court jester here in Budapest.

The paintings, most of them acrylic on canvas, are all dated 2021 or 2022, and are all for sale. The three works currently on show in London are displayed here as Giclée prints which can also be purchased. The exhibition runs until 15 June.