János Szirtes is an iconic figure of the contemporary art scene in Hungary. He is a painter, a graphic artist, a performer, a video- and media artist and a high-impact teacher, reforming the tuition of art. He is the head of the Media Design Department at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. The defining aspect of János Szirtes's four decades-long, interdisciplinary work is that in addition to his academic studies at the Bratislava College of Fine Arts and the Hungarian College of Fine Arts, he was also a member of the outstanding underground artistic workshops of the 1970s and 1980s. The innovative research conducted through experiments at the legendary Indigo Group led by Miklós Erdély, the general interdisciplinary attitude, the liberating, dadaist atmosphere of the Lajos Vajda Studio in Szentendre and the performances of Tibor Hajas, which opened up new avenues in art, all had a profound influence on the artistic position of János Szirtes. His paintings range from the tribal, organic-surrealist processing of motifs through a language of forms that breaks down living organisms into crystal-like shapes to multi-layered, formalist compositions, where the experience of space is established through the superimposition of layers and various ornamental elements. His images, which operate with expressive colours, dynamic forms, archaic symbols and motifs borrowed from other cultures, bring canonised and alternative (sub)cultures into a shared space. The creative process can be seen as an action, a performance or a rite – letting the image preserve the imprints of these gestures and movements that epitomise creative activity. Krisztina Kovács