Kiss showed promise as an artist at an early age. Between 1988 and 1990, she studied at the Budapest Decoration School, where she worked and experimented with plastic forms and mannequins. From 1992 to 1997, she was a student at Budapest’s prestigious Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME).
After receiving her diploma in textile design, she spent two years in Tuscany, Italy, as a textile designer. She studied the great Italian Renaissance painters who remain a significant influence; she produces large oil paintings on wood as they did but with a 3D twist. Her hero is El Greco because of his colors and technique.
Returning from Italy in 2000, Kiss worked for an art and fashion company in Budapest. She created her own company, Art Active, and organized fashion shows. All the while, she was making illustrations and designs on commission and painting. Her work was exhibited throughout Hungary. Much of her time was spent helping other artists become successful. Kiss’ work took on a surrealist aspect when she began traveling to the Balearic Island of Mallorca.
“I spent hours gazing at the sea, absorbing the colors and soaking up the Mediterranean sense of antiquity,” she tells me.
Surrealism developed after the end of World War I when certain artists felt insanity and unreason had triumphed over decades of academic tradition and unbroken continuity. Artists such as Rene Magritte, who Kiss admires enormously, painted illogical or dreamlike scenes to, as Surrealist leader André Breton said, “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality or surreality.”
Today, as a modern Hungarian Surrealist, Kiss creates a finely detailed world that feels intensely symbolic.
Powerful Force
“The symbol of the lily reoccurs in my work, morphing from a soft, organic blue flower into an angular form that gives birth to seeds that float off into the air,” she said. “The lily represents mercy. But underneath its softness, it’s a powerful force. When its form becomes angular, it gives birth to the chess pieces that symbolize battle. We never know when softness will transform into conflict. The floating balls represent possibility. Broken steps symbolize boundaries.”
Asked what Surrealism means to her, Kiss explains, “It’s about the difference between what’s supposed to be real and what’s imagined. I want to stimulate curiosity in the viewer. My paintings invite the observer to ask their own questions and find their own answers. When a friend renovated their house, they stored paintings of mine in their garage. One day, the workers all vanished from the house. My friend went looking for them. He found them in his garage, standing in a semi-circle, smoking and gazing at my paintings in silence. They were transfixed, he said. I love that story.”
Apart from Magritte and El Greco, Kiss also admires Stella Sneed, Felix Labisse, Pierre Reverdy, Edgar Endre and David Lynch, best known for his movies and TV series. Kiss was impressed by the 2019 exhibition of Lynch’s black and white photos at the Hall of Art (the Műcsarnok or Kunsthalle) on Budapest’s Heroes’ Square.
Someone who knows their art history might spot a resemblance between Kiss’ work and that of Greek-born Italian painter Guiseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico. Kiss and de Chirico share a sense of haunted melancholy created by their use of architectural forms, mannequins, long shadows, strange perspectives and interest in metaphysics. Oddly, Kiss was unaware of de Chirico until a friend pointed out the similarities in their work.
“When I was shown paintings by de Chirico such as ‘The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon’ painted in 1910 or ‘The Grand Metaphysician’ from 1917, I realized I had a connection without knowing it,” Kiss tells me. “I’ve used mannequins in my work ever since childhood, for example. De Chirico’s work felt instantly familiar to me.”
In 2024, Kiss entered a competition run by London’s Boomer Gallery and was a place winner. Her work was featured in the gallery’s magazine. It was also shown at the Paris Art Expo. The Thomson Gallery in Switzerland, where Kiss exhibited, said of her painting “Stillness, Movement & the Sea” that it was a standout.
Contemplate Your Journey
“Visitors resonated with its deep emotional undercurrents, expressing how it made them contemplate their own journeys through life’s fluctuations.”
Outside the galleries, Surrealism, especially Dali and Magritte, has always appealed to art lovers with little interest in contemporary art fashions. The same is true today. Kiss couldn’t say precisely why Surrealism is experiencing a revival.
“It could be because many of us feel we’re living in a surreal world, and the art reflects our feelings, our desire for freedom and our deepest fears,” she suggests. Kiss believes the fact that her work expresses her conviction that she must do what’s right for her, create her own world, play her own game, resonates with visitors to galleries and her 7.5 thousand followers on Instagram.
“My Instagram followers often tell me how much I give them,” Kiss says. “Some, inspired by me, tell me they’ve carried on painting when they’ve felt like giving up.”
Kiss herself is inspired by the example of Hungarian painter Judit Reigl. “Because of my life experience, I have many more ideas than when I was younger, and I’m scared I won’t have time to realize them all. Reigl painted until she died aged 97. I will never stop.”
In 2025, Kiss will have exhibitions in Switzerland and Mallorca. You can learn more about the artist and her work via her website, gabriellakissart.com.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of December 13, 2024.
