Sanctuary of Beasts, 1995
Installation, mural acrylic wall painting (destroyed, ephemeral work) – 2500 × 6000 × 4000 mm
Hungarian University of Fine Arts Dormitory, Budapest, Hungary
A key work in the early oeuvre of Bónyai Barbara, Sanctuary of Beasts functions simultaneously as an intimate spatial diary and an expressive mythology of the body. This monumental, cave-like acrylic mural was created in Room 210 of the dormitory at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, the private living space the artist shared with her then-husband, the sculptor István Drabik. Covering the walls and ceiling, Bónyai’s grotesquely distorted, imaginary mythological beings formed an autonomous world composed of instinct, memory, and imagination. Their intense presence transformed the space into a sacred and surreal sanctuary. The painted surfaces acted like “skins,” channeling emotions and unconscious content through a raw, archaic visual language.
The work belongs to the Tardigrade Cycle (1994-1996), which, through a series of sculptures and drawings, explores the pre-cultural, instinct-driven dimensions of the human form. Sanctuary of Beasts can be seen as a spatial manifestation of this period: the decontextualized, disproportionate figures and their mimetic expressivity do not represent the body but instead treat it as language and as a site of trauma.
Ephemerality plays a crucial role in the work: after the couple moved out, the mural was destroyed (1996), rendering the piece not only a meditation on physical and emotional presence but also on absence, erasure, and the persistence of memory. In this gesture, Bónyai already subverts the idea of permanence and the objecthood of art, proposing instead an understanding of artistic creation as a mutable, often vanishing, yet deeply formative event.
Sanctuary of Beasts is thus more than a wall painting inserted into a domestic space: it is the embodiment of a private mythology, a visual manifestation of instinct and the unconscious that transforms personal space into an inner, spiritual-psychic landscape.