Two eggs, over easy...

Two eggs, over easy… by Diki Luckerson (HU) & Júlia Standovár (HU)

curator: Landon Wilson  (US)

opening on May 30, 2025, 6:00 pm

May 31 – June 28, 2025
TOBE Gallery | Budapest, Hungary

in collaboration with DOXA by Emese Mucsi

What happens when you crack open an egg? Sometimes you get breakfast. Here, you get a metaphor for transformation.

Two eggs, over easy… all began in the aisle of a Brooklyn grocery store. In a moment of crisis, Júlia Standovár (b. 1987) felt the weight of past, present, and future simultaneously, realizing she was unable to afford a carton of eggs in her thirties. This sense of personal precarity and momentary detachment from self and time is mobilized here by the egg: an object fragile, familiar, and symbolically loaded. Joined in this discipline-colliding exhibition by Diki Luckerson (b. 1994), both artists use the conceptual weight of the egg as a point of departure and a means of connecting their (seemingly) disparate practices.

Like an egg prepared “over easy,” Standovár and Luckerson’s works present a surface that seems contained and “cooked”, but beneath it, emotions, distant memories, and their meanings remain fluid and unresolved. At a moment of personal and artistic transition, both find themselves revisiting their childhoods, youthful subjectivity, and shared Hungarian origins from afar in New York City. Though their methods differ, they each “crack open” internal dialogues and cultural narratives, letting what’s half-formed and hidden seep into view, all while considering vulnerability, reinvention, and the absurd.

In the week leading up to the show’s opening, Luckerson transforms the adjacent DOXA into a live-in studio, painting a “fresco” while inhabiting the space as it evolves, letting it spill out onto Bródy Sandór Street and greater Budapest. Those passing by can witness her at work through the space’s large window, which also acts as an invitation to step into the work itself, folding circumstance and conversation into the process of making.

Luckerson’s intuitive, gestural style originated with the effervescent rhythm of her films, two of which are on view. Egg 1  (2013), made in a hot blur of youth, is simultaneously affectionate and chaotic. Egg 2  (2024/25), created especially for this exhibition, returns with original and new collaborators, which include friends, strangers, and her grandmother. Filmed across Budapest, it’s part dream, part memory, where the egg, in all of its symbolism and phenomenology reappears–stranger this time–tethering past to present and looking beyond with a quiet feminist urgency.

At TOBE Gallery, Standovár’s Chain Forest anchors the show with photographs of heavy chains laid across rural landscapes in upstate NY, visualizing entanglements of the mind, memory, and shifting body, in remote places that seem foreign yet uncannily familiar. Chains, long part of her practice, represent the way our thoughts link and loop, and how getting lost in our minds can feel like entering a dense, quiet forest: still, yet constantly in motion. Sculptural in their short-lived, site-specific form, the compositions are later frozen through photography, moving from three- to two-dimensional; from gesture to image. The egg emerges as a convergence of economic and political symbolism, particularly resonant in Hungary and the U.S., where questions of bodily autonomy and fertility grow increasingly fraught. Titles (mostly by Standovár, some by Luckerson) remain crucial: poetic and unexpected, they invite the viewer into interior “forests” of our own.

From their soaring prices to the politics of reproductive rights, the egg is a potent metaphor for both fragility and resistance, capturing the strange poetry of living in a world where internalized monologues and the socio-political are always, inevitably, intertwined. Together, these works by Luckerson and Standovár hold emotion, critique, and play within a tender, slightly off-kilter tension, where meaning is cooked slowly, and always a little runny.

Landon Wilson, curator