Tamás ‘Menyus’ Menyhárt is a well-known, legendary figure in Budapest’s sub cultural scene, who for decades has lived and worked outside the official canon and the institutional gallery system. Although he has deliberately kept his dis tance from the world of contemporary commercial galleries, he nonetheless has a large following, and in effect gets by thanks to a non-profit safety net of collectors. His art is a combination of the unfettered rebellion of the Hungar ian punk underground of the 1980s and the transcendent view of the world he has developed from his own experience. While the legacy of the fifty-year-old countercultural revolution and Exploited’s Fuck the system! attitude remain fundamental elements of his artistic presence, Menyus says that his ethereal existential concerns have long since taken him beyond the confines of classic punk. The principal measure of his art is not commercial success, trends or the expectations of the ‘art world’ but solely his inner experience and his uncom promising honesty as an artist.
Menyus’s career began in the most conventional way. He enrolled at a sports secondary school in Győr but soon realised that art was his main interest. He at tended the drawing club run by glass artist László Hefter, where his talent was quickly recognised. He mastered the techniques of lithography, linocut and etch ing at the Graphic Workshop of Győr and was subsequently able to put these skills to particularly good use at the Graphic Arts course at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest (now the University of Fine Arts). At the same time, he was as drawn to music as he was to the visual arts. He co-founded a punk band, Teknősbika [Turtle Bull], with his friend Zsolt Kunert. With their ‘noise music’ and perfor mances, evoking the band Galloping Coroners, the band regularly performed not only in underground clubs in Győr but also at several Budapest venues.
A conflict with Imre Kocsis, head of department at the College of Fine Arts, nearly ended his higher education studies, but his talent as an artist was rec ognised at an early stage: he won the Béla Kondor Prize in 1993, followed by the Jenő Barcsay Prize in 1995, while a scholarship from the Ludwig Foundation enabled him to go on study trips to Norway. However, the momentum of his early success floundered in the second half of the 1990s, and he stopped exhibiting in Hungary for a decade. Following a hellish period fuelled by drugs, Tamás Meny hárt only made his return to the artistic public sphere at the end of 2006. The newly established Boulevard&Brezsnyev Gallery, which primarily showcased young alternative artists, provided him with a base and opportunities to exhibit.
He gained national renown in the spring of 2007 thanks to a short, sev en-minute video published on Index.1 The short feature film by Dániel Ács and Balázs Horváth introduced a young man with a huge ego and astonishingly ec centric behaviour to an audience with underground leanings. The video unex pectedly gained a cult following and turned the painter, who by that time had beaten his heroin addiction and was once again working obsessively, into a kind of alternative hero. In the years that followed, he regularly held exhibitions and staged performances in cult bars rather than at official exhibition venues and successful commercial galleries. His openings became events in their own right, with his duo Kata-valami [Kate Something], formed with Csaba Henk also regularly performing at these events.
Tamás Menyhárt’s artistic style had fully matured by the mid-2010s. He had produced some outstanding works in his earlier periods, but it was by this time that the unmistakable features of his painting had become firmly established. The reduced palette, charcoal reminiscent of cave paintings, the red of blood, the brilliance of the gold and silver known from the Trecento and from icons, the dynamic graphic framework and paint dripping, restless gestural movements and assemblages of found objects have been characteristics of his paintings ever since. The abstraction of his earlier work dwindled and his subject matter is now almost always figurative; in addition to his expressionist drawings of faces and hands, the recurring symbols that make up Menyus’s principal arsenal are skulls, crosses, stigmata, halos, bleeding hearts, wounding knives, pointing fingers, devil’s horns, angel wings, rays of light and stardust. The Mantra for Dead Friends, which he wrote, also doggedly reappears in his paintings again and again as a background element.
He makes ‘soul portraits’ of acquaintances on commission or spontane ously. Angels – whether good or fallen – are recurring figures in his personal mythology, and he often paints angel wings on his friends (and even on himself). In some cases, he also adds stigmata and halos, the latter recently given a rec tangular form in his works as the aureola quadrata in medieval iconography was a symbol of saints who were still alive (e.g. benefactors and patrons). Initially portraying himself as a tourist in Hell, he has increasingly depicted himself as a temporary inhabitant of the vestibule of Hell: sometimes as a saint and at other times both as an angel and as the Devil. Muses and seraphim appear in his oeuvre as supportive figures.
When looking for his artistic kin, the names of Schiele and Basquiat first come to mind. In terms of lifestyle, Modigliani and Soutine. His Hungarian pre decessor is Béla Kondor, whose influence he himself acknowledges. Of his many painter friends who have since died, he remembers the punk-expressionist Lackó Szilágyi and the dadaist Tibor Bada with particular affection; however, he himself believes that he has gone beyond their spiritual outlook with his transcendental worldview. In recent years, he has often painted on framed pic tures he finds at flea markets, reworking and overwriting them with his own iconography, thus giving them a new lease of life.
Zoltán Rockenbauer, curator
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Building on the ideas of Daniel Arasse, the 2026 Frissen Exhibition explores the Renaissance thesis that a work of art inevitably reflects the individuality of its creator. Although the death of painting has been predicted many times—both since the advent of photography and from the perspective of critiques of capitalism—the genre has always been revitalized and strengthened through aesthetic and social self-reflection. The Műcsarnok’s seventh exhibition in the “one artist—one room—one curator” series seeks to answer the question of why artists paint today. This collection of personal exhibitions showcases the diversity of the profession through the latest abstract and figurative works by six Hungarian contemporary painters, brought directly from their studios.
Artist-curator pairs: Ákos Bánki and Szilvia Reischl, Réka Kaszás and Mária Kondor-Szilágyi, Gábor Király and Gréta Garami, Kati Könyv and Réka Fazakas, Tamás Menyhárt and Zoltán Rockenbauer, Kata Verebics and Anna Blanka Nagy