More than three decades after the revolutions of 1989, Hungarian contemporary artists must again navigate an uneasy path to creative freedom. Even as its museums are co- opted to the cause of Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian nationalism, the country’s art scene remains vibrant — ignored, perhaps, by a regime that leans on historical grievances to fabricate its present reality.

Weiler (lives Budapest) draws on the ballast bequeathed by socialism, portraying Western cultural icons of the Chelsea Hotel as if they were late-Soviet heroes, captured on newsreel of the era. In evoking these figures of the Western avant-garde, the works suggest a nostalgia for an alternative future: phantoms of democracy and liberty of the imagination.

drMarias (lives Budapest) was born into Tito’s Yugoslavia, marinated in the Milošević nightmare then fled to Hungary where he finally accepted his fate as a citizen of a democratic dictatorship. As befitting such a stance, his oeuvre is assertively divisive, fusing well-known of Western paintings with dictators against a rapid-fire backdrop of modernism.

Both Weiler and drMarias’s work express the dilemma of artistic freedom on both sides of the 20th-century’s ideological divide. In doing so, they bring into focus the cultural destruction of creative repression — the ‘what ifs’ of aesthetic achievement that never came to life.