Zsolt Berszán
Carnivorous Plant in the Field #3, 2026
oil and graphite on canvas
130 x 180 cm
51 1/8 x 70 7/8 in
51 1/8 x 70 7/8 in
“The Flesh-Eating Bloom” by Zsolt Berszán, continues his artistic and aesthetic investigations into the limits of matter and the dissolution of boundaries between the organic and the inorganic. Hosted in the historic space of the old steam bath, Altes Dampfbad - a site defined by the presence of the central thermal spring - Berszán’s artistic intervention establishes a dialogue between the memory of water and the radical materiality of contemporary art. The artist orchestrates a meeting both brutal and sublime between biological immanence and transfigured inorganic matter, utterly surpassing the limits of classical anatomy.
At the heart of the curatorial discourse lies the concept of unconventional genesis. The artist probes the ontological potential of silicone and bitumen—materials that, though industrial in essence, are reinvested with a biological pulse through artistic transposition. This “devouring bloom” is not a metaphor for decomposition, but rather a manifestation of raw vital force that transcends known forms. Silicone, whose structural composition evokes the original fluidity of water, is used here as a binder between the rigid architecture of metal and the plasticity of the suggested matter.
The Unknown Plant (2026) series propose a morphology of hybridization. Sculptures made of metal structures and silicone build themselves in space like neural networks or vascular systems, suggesting the birth of new quasi-convulsive entities. These “unknown” forms are not static artifacts, but entities in permanent expansion. They represent what Julia Kristeva defines as the “abject” - that intermediate stage that disturbs order and identity, situated between subject and object. In Berszán’s vision, the “unknown plant” is a witness to a post-biological evolution, a network of resilience that feeds on its own residues.
The investigation continues in the two-dimensional plane - painting and drawing - in the series Carnivorous Plant in the Field (2025-2026), where the pictorial gesture becomes an incision. Referring to Kristeva’s theory of the abject, these works disturb the symbolic order: the flower is transformed into a receptive organ of a vital force that feeds on its own source to generate the new. Dense brushstrokes and successive layers of pigment create a topography of anxiety, in which flesh and petal fuse indistinctly under the viewer’s gaze.
The climax of the discourse is marked by the Untitled (2014-2017) series, in which bitumen, water, and silicone materialize an archaeology of fluids, fixing the ephemerality of life into a perennial form. “The Flesh-Eating Bloom” transforms Altes Dampfbad into a new reality of the living: a “bloom of matter” which, through its inherent devouring nature, celebrates the regenerative force of the unknown and transmutes water into the physis of a new aesthetic reality.
Curator: Diana Dochia PhD
