Anna
TÁNCOS

Baby cave, 2023

Akryl on canvas, 120×80 cm

About the artist

Anna TÁNCOS (1992) is an architect who also paints, graffiti, ceramics and is always on the lookout for architectural forms and the oddities of people. But it all comes together: what inspires her and how she creates. He often wanders off to the landscapes where Csontváry visited, where the earth still hides Etruscan vases, but he is not interested in the cool beauty of marble, but in its ruins, where teenage boys in gangs listen to trap music. He is captivated not by the exposed pedestal of the classic Apollo torso but by its plastic souvenir, not by the baroque facade of Il Gesu but by the crumbling plaster of the pre-modern orange facades of Garbatella's suburban experiment, and is inspired more by the metaphysical paintings of De Chirico than by the star architects of post-modernism. These are mirrored in the transcendent ruins of his landscapes, his crystalline flower portraits under neon twilights and his statues of graces, with their crooked backs, struggling to hold the weight of ceramic bowls.

ABOUT ANNA TÁNCOS

Anna Táncos is more of an architect than a painter, more of a painter than a graffiti artist, and more of a graffiti artist than a ceramicist. I believe she is all of these: whether it’s a spray-painted piece (Tanz) on the crumbling wall of an abandoned Kádár-era holiday home in Balatonaliga, a road trip to a Kisboldogasszony pilgrimage in a village near the Bakony, or reading the books of Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic, while painting under Art Nouveau lamps in a street above Déli Railway Station. When I talk to her about architecture, our favorite Hungarian rappers, or the houses of Rome’s Garbatella district, I don’t see any difference between these topics.

"The sky was violet. And the stars were green. And the Sun was green, too." — reads a passage from the only Hungarian-translated novel by Paul Scheerbart, the German fiction writer, art historian, and visionary utopian. This novel is a utopia—about a peculiar species with a peculiar society and architecture—essentially a condensed version of the ideas Scheerbart formulated in his major work, the 1914 book Glassarchitektur (Glass Architecture). In his 111-point architectural manifesto, he writes about the architectural use of glass, arguing that glass architecture is a transcendent, mental liberator and renewer of human existence.

That same year, Bruno Taut, the German expressionist architect influenced by Scheerbart’s glass visions, built the Glass Pavilion for the first Deutsche Werkbund exhibition, with inscriptions from the 111-point manifesto on its façade. A year later, Scheerbart went on a hunger strike in protest against the outbreak of war—and died from it. The deeply pacifist Taut sought refuge in Scheerbartian ideas, creating two architectural utopias filled with paintings and blueprints: Die Stadtkrone and Alpine Architektur between 1917 and 1919. He envisioned glass cities atop the Alps, each with a temple and a tower-like public building. The domed, arcaded, geometric forms of these structures appear as organic natural phenomena, yet they remain connected to both ancient monumental architecture and a kind of bourgeois orientalism.

In Anna’s paintings, beneath the violet sky, in the light of the green sun, buildings appear on the slopes of mountain ranges. Sometimes they are ruins, sometimes cities, sometimes mere architectural elements that could resemble ancient ruins, Russian constructivist buildings, or Bruno Taut’s expressionist visions (Crystal Palace, Sicily, Castles Built on Sand, Melancholy). To me, they most closely resemble pieces of a construction toy designed by Taut, called Dandanah, which consisted of 62 glass building blocks in various colors and shapes. The set came with sample arrangements, but it seems as though Anna didn’t follow them.

Bruno Taut’s era was defined by a fundamental escapism that turned people’s attention toward mystical, transcendental teachings, such as Theosophy or the eclectic European-style esoteric movements inspired by Eastern religions. A similar longing for escape can be observed in Anna’s works—both an external pull toward beautiful Mediterranean landscapes and an internal journey into a mystical inner castle. However, this mysticism is not the Theosophy of the early 20th century; rather, it evokes the world of Mária Szepes’s séances in her Pasarét apartment in the 1970s, where she mourned the lost bourgeois world. A place where Angel Tarot by Édesvíz Publishing, the thoughts of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the teachings of Meister Eckhart, alchemy, and comparative religious studies coexisted.

When I look at Anna’s painting Baby Barlang, I think of the elderly Mária Szepes with her teased hair, and I hear her voice from The Water of Life meditation on YouTube, saying: “The sanctuary of Asclepius is an open Greek temple, resting on four columns, with an altar in the center, its blinding white marble etched against the deep blue sky of Hellas…” She had the ability to synthesize the incomprehensibility of mysticism with everyday reality, creating a unique aesthetic that drifts toward a familiar and endearing kitsch—like a holographic holy card, where the simple prayer on the back holds elemental knowledge and intuitive wisdom.

Anna’s paintings (Inner Castle) have a similar nature, inspired both by medieval mystics—such as Meister Eckhart’s writings or Saint Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle—and by the sunlit artificial roses in rural church interiors, the glitter-haloed martyr saints on paper holy cards, or the memory of a grandmother singing Lamb of God off-key at Mass.

Anna lives in a pre-modern apartment building from the 1920s, which could just as well stand in the suburbs of Rome. Her studio is there too, with a Secessionist lamp hanging from the ceiling, its shade tinted purple, beneath which paintings lean against the wall. The atmosphere of the room feels as if we had stepped into one of the interiors from Zoltán Huszárik’s Sindbad. The film’s spaces are dense, overflowing with colors and ornaments that grow wild, much like the characters who inhabit them. The present in the film is Sindbad’s past—bittersweet, scented with tears and rosemary, a Secessionist 1970s.

Sindbad could have traveled through Anna’s rocky Mediterranean landscapes too, had his heart not failed him at Herkulesfürdő. This reminds me of a film by Juraj Herz, one of the key figures of the Czech New Wave. In 1972, a year after Sindbad, Herz directed Morgiana, where the heroines suffer from unfulfilled love and desire—not in Buda, but in an Italian landscape. The film’s visual language similarly fuses late 19th-century Secessionist aesthetics with the imagery of its own time.

In Anna’s floral portraits (Twilight with Roses, Blossoming), I see the women of Morgiana—staggering at the edges of cliffs, among arcades and ruins, in their corsets, oversized hats, and billowing dresses, intoxicated by an excess of joy and longing for death. The film has two heroines, both played by the same actress, with the conflict built on their duality—their opposing personalities canceling each other out. This contrast and mirrored tension evoke the interplay of female aspects, a theme also present in Anna’s ceramic figures. These figures are sometimes physically strained by the many roles and archetypes they must embody all at once—the plates and slabs placed upon them crack under the weight, or their glaze fractures from the tension holding them together.

But why should they have to decide who they are—sirens, graces, mothers, daughters, or the sculpted figures of decorative fountains in the main squares of Kádár-era housing estates? I don’t think Anna needs to define herself either. Is she an architect, designing windows and doors for hours on end in a large firm? A painter, free to escape into visionary landscapes and mystical twilights? Or a graffiti artist, defying the rules, wandering through the deserted barracks of an abandoned military base?

Sindbad, in the end, would probably just say: “The trouble is, I understand life no better than a child.”

Táncos Anna is an architect who also paints, does graffiti, and works with ceramics—all while keeping an eye out for the strange forms of architecture and the peculiar habits of people. But for her, these things all connect: what inspires her and how she creates.

She often longs for the landscapes once visited by Csontváry, where the earth still hides Etruscan vases. But she isn’t drawn to the cool beauty of marble; rather, she’s interested in its ruins, where teenage boys hang out and listen to trap music. She’s not captivated by the classical Apollo torso displayed in a museum, but by its plastic souvenir version. It’s not the early Baroque façade of Il Gesù that catches her eye, but the crumbling plaster on the orange façades of Garbatella’s pre-modern experimental garden city. She isn’t inspired by the star architects of postmodernism, but by De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings.

Anna Zsoldos

EXHIBITIONS

2021
Atlantika with my mates
Dinghi pop up store, gallery and playground, Budapest

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025

delulu is (not) the solulu

Rechnitzer Gallery, Budapest

2023
Spicy Dreams
Useless Galeri, Budapest

2023
Dindin exhibition
Dindin Gallery, Budapest

2023
The Tent
Useless Gallery, Budapest

2017
Amerigo Tot Museum - diploma project
Piranesi Prize exhibition, Piran, SLO

2017
Amerigo Tot Museum - diploma project
Hauszmann Prize exhibition, Budapest

2016
Contrast material
Frame Club, Budapest

STUDIES

2010-2017
Faculty of Architecture, Department of Public Building Design
Budapest University of Technology and Economics

2016-2017
Facolta di Architettura
Sapienza Università di Roma