Gábor Lajta, Munkácsy Mihály Award-winning painter and full member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA), turns 70 in 2025.
To mark this occasion, he presents his latest paintings on the 5th floor of the Pesti Vigadó.

The works on display depict the Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, through 12 large-scale paintings that lead the viewer through the poem’s twelve main scenes.

In January 2024, the artist spoke about his project as follows:

“Madness – that’s the only word that comes to mind ever since I lost my way in the dark forest. In 2021, on the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, I decided to paint the Divine Comedy. But what does it even mean, to ‘paint’ it? You can’t just do that — there’s so much happening in a single canto that you couldn’t even turn it into a proper comic book. And yet, the idea struck me like lightning, though I didn’t know why.
All I knew, with reasonable certainty, was that yes, this is what I need to do — and, in fact, I have always painted subjects — nudes, crowd scenes, basement taverns, mythological or biblical scenes — that, in one way or another, already contain something of the Divine Comedy: darker, more dramatic, and, in the truest sense of the word, more fateful.”

Organizer: Hungarian Academy of Arts – Section of Fine Arts