Dorottya Vékony

Dorottya Vékony (b. 1985) is a Hungarian artist, born in Debrecen, who lives and works in Budapest. She studied photography at the University of Kaposvár and at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, taking her MA there in 2014; she entered its doctoral school in 2021. Photography is her main medium, and she often combines it with objects, installations, photobooks or video.

For several years her work has dealt with fertility and reproductive rights, and with situations in which birth cannot take place: infertility, miscarriage, abortion. In a 2021 statement written with the curator Fruzsina Kigyós, she traced her thinking about the body to her childhood and to kickboxing, which she practiced for twelve years. Her solo exhibition Venus Mount – Matrial Art Club at Longtermhandstand in Budapest (September to November 2025) started from the women’s boxing club she founded, where, in the words of Flóra Gadó’s exhibition text, the emphasis is on “being together, holding space, and practicing.”

She received the József Pécsi Art Photography Scholarship three times, in 2015, 2017 and 2018. In 2023 Budapest Gallery showed her solo exhibition Rites of Letting Go, and from November 2023 to April 2024 her work was in Darker, Lighter, Puffy, Flat at Kunsthalle Wien. In November 2024 Longtermhandstand, the Budapest gallery that represents her, presented her work in the Emergence sector of Paris Photo. In 2025 she was one of three winners of the Esterházy Art Award, whose nominees were shown at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, and won the TÓTalJOY Prize for a project with the working title Subfense and Other Soft Defenses, a planned experimental documentary film and object-based installation on how the tools of self-defense and resistance can become shared knowledge.

From February to April 2026 KOENIG2 in Vienna showed her solo exhibition Communion of Nurture. The same year Longtermhandstand took her work to Material Art Fair in Mexico City and included her in the group exhibition On Paper in Budapest (August 6 to October 2, 2026).