Curatorial Review
by Oleksandr Dyvnich
Katarina Stiller, a Hungarian artist trained as a painter in Győr and now studying graphic design in Budapest, works around one persistent subject: the body as the place where feeling becomes visible. Moving freely between oil, mixed media, relief and photography, she returns again and again to the relationship between the sexes and to emotions that are felt before they are named. Because she often places herself inside the work, her figures read less as models than as stand-ins for lived experience, which gives the work an intimacy that never tips into confession. Exhibited regularly across Hungary since 2018 and published in Műhely and Művész.ma, she has already built a recognisable visual language.
Katarina Stiller | Dallampótló | 2022
In Dallampótló (Melody-Replacer, 2022, oil on canvas, 134 × 144 cm), a man kisses the chest of a female figure. Sweeping, charcoal-dark marks frame this intimate encounter, while acidic greens and red accents lend the flesh a restless, almost bruised quality. The scene holds tenderness and emotional tension together, making physical closeness feel both vulnerable and unsettled.
Katarina Stiller | Pólusok | 2023
Pólusok (Poles, 2023, oil on paper, 150 × 211 cm) pushes this further: two profiles meet nose to nose and nearly dissolve into umber, drips and rust-red scratches. At this scale the near-kiss becomes physical, and attraction and opposition turn into a single gesture.
Katarina Stiller | Pillanatnyi Jóváhagyás – Déjà Vu | 2025
Pillanatnyi jóváhagyás – déjà vu (Momentary Approval – Déjà Vu, 2025) shows a standing nude whose face is hidden behind a raised arm. Ochre, umber and white are dragged and scraped against black until the body seems carved out of light, while the concealed face withholds exactly what the viewer seeks. In Megérint a képzelet (Touched by Imagination, 2024), from the series Vágyakozás (Longing), the torso is built up in relief, its impasto and fabric imprints turning the body into something closer to a relic or an excavated find.
Katarina Stiller | Vágyakozás – Festménysorozat (Megérint a Képzelet) | 2024
The most ambitious work is Ismeretlen ismerős (Familiar Stranger, 2026, mixed media, 50 × 114 cm): a lozenge-shaped panel with a female figure, arms raised, partly covered in shards of mirror. The fragments catch the room and the viewer, laying our own broken reflection over the painted body.
Katarina Stiller | Ismeretlen Ismerős | 2026
Stiller’s strengths are a confident gestural hand, a disciplined earthy palette and real ease with large formats. Her steady movement from flat paint to relief to reflective material shows an artist thinking about the surface itself, not only the image on it. The risk lies in familiarity: the nude and the expressionist vocabulary of sweeps and drips carry a long history, and in places the gesture says more about tradition than about her. Her strongest moments are those that complicate looking, such as the hidden face or the mirror that turns the viewer into part of the work. Here her photographic awareness of the gaze feels most alive, and it is the direction most worth pursuing. Stiller is a young artist of genuine promise, already speaking with a voice of her own.
