18 Questions With...
Dávid Németh

My practice lives somewhere between monumental painting, collage, and surreal imagery. I pull from psychedelic cartoons, shimmering surfaces, and whatever slips between digital and analog. It’s about testing how painting can hold all that chaos at once.

I’ve always thought of myself as an adventurer, someone who never stops exploring or playing. I try to hold on to that childlike spirit. As a kid, I spent most of my time in the garden, which felt less like a yard and more like a universe of colors, textures, and smells.

After high school I was pulled toward art. It was what I was curious about, what felt right. But it took years before I understood what that choice really meant. A few years ago, something shifted. I finally began to see myself as an artist, and that realization grounded me.

It’s cold and rainy outside, but inside the studio everything feels warm and in place. For me, that’s a perfect day.

Yess, e.g. Albert Oehlen, Julian Schnabel, Charles Bukowski.

I’m drawn to the overload of images we live with. The warped, post-digital echoes of reality in flux. The landscape shaped by relentless consumerism, the machinery of capitalism, and the gradual erosion of individuality.

It depends on my mood. I've considered music important since I was a child. I have a diverse taste in music, I'm open to listen almost anything from folk music to space noise. But mostly electronic music nowadays.

A solo exhibition in an old castle on an island.

I approach discovery in painting the way Ikebana approaches flowers: when I see something worth placing into the work, it motivates me to keep building.

Spray guns.

One word: vision.

Getting advice from other artists is always valuable - it makes you pause, reflect, and see things from a new angle. The best advice usually pushes you forward.

Advice starts out as noise. I take it in, sit with it, and choose whether it matters to me or not.

I focus on my visions, phantasmagoria, cataclysm, and posthuman/post-digital states - all tools to analyze the fragmentation of reality.

I really like the space at Horizont Gallery in Budapest, where I’m represented. At the same time, I feel closely connected to artist-run initiatives and off-spaces across Europe. Traveling and visiting museums and galleries abroad has had a big influence on me.

I often pick up on recurring character traits in people. It’s interesting how the same patterns keep showing up across different phases of my life.

I really loved Barcelona, but Brittany (in France) was also incredible.

Patience was hard for me to learn. At first I rushed into everything, but eventually I realized that allowing things to take shape slowly brought real growth.