This Is What I See From The Back Window At Sunset
Toto vidím cez zadné okno pri západe slnka
Ezt látom a hatsó ablakból naplementénél
Akava si so dikhav kotar o paluno phani kana o kham perel
Curators: Péter Bencze, Zuzana Janečková
Exhibition opening: 27. 1. 2026 at 6pm.
Exhibition period: 28. 1. - 17. 5. 2026
VSG, Hlavná 27, Košice, Hall Q
The exhibition This Is What I See From The Back Window At Sunset presents a selection of work by OMARA Mara Oláh (1945-2020), an artist who is best known for her expressive paintings featuring striking textual elements and an idiosyncratic combination of different media. OMARA began creating art at the age of 43 following the death of her mother and the onset of her own health issues. Although she lacked any formal training, she created authentic and original works which represent an important testimony of life, identity and social relationships from the perspective of a Roma woman living in the second half of the 20th century. She is now considered one of the most significant and widely exhibited female Roma artists on the international art scene, and her works feature in the collections of many renowned institutions.
The dramaturgy of the exhibition introduces the viewer to various different layers of OMARA’s life and work. Photographs and a new short film by the Hungarian director Abel Santa (2024) present a series of fragments of her life, including her television appearances as a fortune teller. This fact inspired the architectonic concept of the exhibition, but the fortune telling motif corresponds to the curatorial interpretation which operates at the level of metatexts, deliberately rejecting the interpretation of individual works in an art historical approach and presenting instead an experimental spectrum of meanings.
A crucial point in the artist’s life came with her decision to move to the village of Szarvasgede, where she built her own wooden house with a swimming pool which she adapted according to her own wishes. As a member of an ethnic minority, she encountered prejudice and even hatred, but she overcame these difficulties through her energy and sense of humour. She knew exactly what she wanted (and what she didn’t want), and her sheer spontaneity had a magnetic appeal. She literally inhabited the spaces in which many of her exhibitions were held, and visitors could even be treated to guided tours at four o’clock in the morning. Her work offers a powerful insight into her culture, philosophy and unforgettable style, and also reveals clear traces of her activism such as her visits to women’s prisons. Another turning point in OMARA’s life came in 1991 when she underwent an eye operation; it was during her recovery from this surgery that she first began to paint. This was followed by the establishment of the Mara Gallery in 1993 and the subsequent recognition of her artistic talent between 2004 and 2009, during which her work was exhibited in Budapest (at the Ludwig Museum), Venice (in the Romani Pavilion at the Biennale), and in Viena (at the Kunsthalle). She remains a fixture on the international art scene, with her work featuring in recent exhibitions at RomaMoMA, ERIAC, the Victoria Albert Hall and the Tate Gallery.
The main section of the exhibition focuses on OMARA’s paintings, presenting an overview from her earliest experiments to her final works. Her first drawings and paintings were initially made in response to her headaches, but she continued with self-portraits and depictions of her only daughter, motifs relating to the house which she built for herself and her responses to the rights of women and Roma people. The exhibition also features her experiments with different techniques and formats, with particular attention being drawn to her so-called “Blue Period” (1997-2010) which is characterized by the use of textual commentaries within her paintings. In addition to this series, many of her “red” paintings are especially striking. Miniatures also formed a significant part of her work, a collection of paintings from between 2000 and 2020 on unconventional media such as cigarette packets and match boxes and sticks used to stretch canvas. All of her works capture the milestones of her life, her motherhood and social themes, but in other series, such as that titled Dancing Trees, she explores landscapes, flowers and trees. The visuals and the title of the exhibition, This Is What I See From The Back Window At Sunset, is taken from the text on one of these paintings, but they also offer a multifaceted semantic interpretation of her eye operation and her fortune telling.
The exhibition as a whole revolves around a unique collection of 22 tarot cards designed by the artist which she actually used in her television appearances as a fortune teller (they were later printed as an insert for a women’s magazine). The pack of cards shows typical motifs from life and is accompanied with explanatory texts on the symbolism of the individual cards. In order to emphasize these aspects of her work, enlarged reproductions of the tarot cards have been created for the exhibition; the entire arrangement of the show is constructed around the cards, and visitors can use their unexpected “readings” of the tarot to interpret the works and the exhibition as a whole. Actual recordings of OMARA’s television appearances in which she predicted the futures of those who called in to her show also feature in the exhibition. Visitors can immerse themselves in a visually captivating and vivid world of colour filled with her deeply affecting statements on life. The exhibition is also accompanied by music which OMARA loved, such as songs by Karel Gott and Engelbert Humperdinck, and the distinctive aroma of the menthol cigars which she smoked.
An educational guidebook in the form of the artist’s ‘zine also forms part of the exhibition, as does a limited-edition series of matches.
Featuring loaned works from and in collaboration with: Roma Kher, Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand Budapest.
The exhibition was supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.
