Art Brussels 2026

Orshi Drozdik (1946) studied at the painting and graphics departments of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts between 1970 and 1974. After graduating, she pursued with a master’s degree between 1974 and 1977 and obtained her DLA degree in 2005. In 1976-77, she was member of the Rózsa Presszó postconceptual artist group. She was awarded with the Kondor Béla prize in 1976 and the Munkácsy Mihály prize in 2004. Since 2015, she has been a member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts. She has been teaching in numerous universities around the world and was the habilitated professor of the painting department of The Hungarian University of Fine Arts between 2005 and 2015. 

 

From 1978, she lived in Amsterdam, then Canada, moved to New York in 1981, and has been traveling ever since. As the most famous Hungarian feminist artist on the international scene, Drozdik has been dealing with art from a woman’s point of view since 1970. Based on the traditions of historical Hungarian feminism and on her linguistic, semiotic studies, she elaborated on a method of systematic critical examination of patriarchal visual representation in the academic year 1974/1975. She first applied it in a series entitled Individual Mythology (1975-77) comprising several hundreds of artworks. To this day, this method is fundamental to her art.

 

Her oeuvre is multifaceted in terms of media and genre, unfolding in painting, graphics, sculpture, photography, installation, video, performance, poetry, literary and theoretical texts, and even book editing, and is indissociable from her personal experiences. It is defined by the systematic analysis of issues concerning the representation of a woman’s body, and of art education as well as artistic and art historical discourses. She elaborated the feminist critique of the patriarchal scientific discourse of the 18th and 19th centuries in her series of works entitled Adventure in Technos Dystopium (1984‒1993). She was the recipient of numerous important grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Gordon Matta-Clark, CAVA and Adolph&Esther Gottlieb Foundations, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Prince Bernard Culturfonds in Amsterdam and the Fondation Cartier, among others.