See Budapest Through a Child’s Eyes at the City of Adventure Exhibition
Budapest celebrates 75 years since its expansion into Greater Budapest with an extraordinary exhibition that invites visitors to rediscover the Hungarian capital through the boundless imagination of children’s book illustrators. Opening at the Deák17 Gallery on November 17, 2025, Budapest – City of Adventure showcases how Hungary’s finest contemporary illustrators transform the city’s streets, landmarks, and neighborhoods into a surreal playground where reality and fantasy blend seamlessly.
This isn’t your typical art exhibition documenting Budapest’s architectural heritage or historical milestones. Instead, it reveals a parallel version of the city that exists only in children’s minds—a place where whales chat in the Danube in front of housing blocks, aliens roam Dohány Street, a T-Rex skeleton supports the Erzsébet Bridge, and a giant coffee cup sits atop a building rooftop. Here, the laws of physics bend, proportions shift, and the gray concrete reality transforms into a colorful wonderland of endless possibilities.
Exhibition Details
- Opening: November 17, 2025 at 5:00 PM
- Exhibition Dates: November 18, 2025 – January 17, 2026
- Location: Deák17 Children and Youth Art Gallery, 1052 Budapest, Deák Ferenc Street 17, 1st floor, doorbell 7
- Curator: Révész Emese, art historian
- Admission: Free
- Languages: Hungarian with some English materials available
Featured Artists
The exhibition brings together 22 of Hungary’s most acclaimed contemporary children’s book illustrators: Baranyay András, Dusik Móni, Egervölgyi Lilla, Marcus Goldson, Herbszt László, Kasza Juli, Kárpáti Tibor, Kőszeghy Csilla, Labrosse Dániel, Molnár Jacqueline, Nagy Norbert, Nemes Anita, Pásztohy Panka, Radványi Maja, Remsey Dávid, Rofusz Kinga, Schmal Róza, Sipos Fanni, Szinvai Dániel, Takács Mari, and Vidák Zsolt.
These artists have illustrated beloved Hungarian children’s books including Heart of Our Homeland Budapest, Storytelling Budapest, The Spotted Lamp-Lighter Lady, Vakkancs Explores Budapest, Budapest Browser, and Paint Budapest. Their work appears in books found in Hungarian homes, schools, and libraries, shaping how generations of children perceive and imagine their capital city.
A Surreal Journey Through Illustrated Budapest
Each illustration displayed represents part of a larger work—typically a children’s book—but the genre’s flexibility allows these pieces to function as independent artworks worthy of gallery walls. And they don’t just function—they captivate. Viewers find themselves pulled into intricate details and visual jokes that make the physical world disappear as you lose yourself in illustrated universes where anything becomes possible.
The exhibition takes you from the monumental circular arcade downtown to the concrete housing estates on the city’s edges, but nothing appears as tourists typically see it. Bird’s-eye perspectives reveal underwater views beneath the Danube’s surface. The legendary M61 Nohab locomotive—long since retired in reality—continues running forever in printed form. A ladder extends from Margaret Island straight into the sky, making that previously mentioned bird’s-eye view suddenly accessible to everyone, not just birds.
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In this version of Budapest, size doesn’t matter and logic takes a holiday. Why shouldn’t a massive coffee cup perch on a rooftop? Who says the Erzsébet Bridge can’t be supported by dinosaur bones? Children accept these realities without question because their Budapest isn’t a complex urban system requiring infrastructure and governance—it’s a giant playground that adults build specifically for their enjoyment. Snow falls so they can go sledding. Buses move slowly across the Chain Bridge to allow time for admiring passing ships. That cute dog appears at exactly the right moment for petting.
More Than an Exhibition
The Deák17 Gallery transforms this exhibition into an interactive cultural playground rather than a passive viewing experience. The space provides coloring books, board games, numerous illustrated books for browsing, and even a giant puzzle depicting Greater Budapest. Children can engage directly with the artistic concepts while adults rediscover the creative freedom they once possessed before reality imposed its limitations.
This comprehensive approach makes the exhibition serve multiple purposes simultaneously. For children, it introduces art’s liberating freedom and validates their imaginative worldview. For adults, it reconnects them with childhood’s boundless creativity when a gray industrial zone could become an adventure setting where miracles happen. Most importantly, it creates a cultural playground where both generations learn from each other through play, including lessons about Greater Budapest’s 75-year history.
The exhibition includes winning entries from a children’s drawing competition on the same theme, displayed as equally valid artistic works alongside professional illustrators’ pieces. This democratic curation reinforces that imagination and creativity don’t require formal training—they require only the willingness to see possibilities beyond conventional reality.
Why This Exhibition Matters for Visitors
Beautifully illustrated children’s books represent cultural win-win situations benefiting everyone involved. Publishers create something genuinely exciting. Artists work with minimal restrictions, finally free to communicate in their most authentic visual language. Young-at-heart readers receive communication in the language they most naturally understand and enjoy.
For foreign visitors, this exhibition offers something rarely accessible in typical tourism—insight into how Hungarian children experience and imagine their capital city. The illustrations reveal cultural perspectives, visual humor, and storytelling traditions specific to Hungarian children’s literature. You see which Budapest landmarks capture childhood imagination, which neighborhoods become adventure settings, and how local artists blend traditional folk elements with contemporary urban reality.
The exhibition’s timing around Greater Budapest’s 75th anniversary adds historical context. In 1950, seven independent cities and 16 large municipalities merged to create the modern capital. This exhibition celebrates that milestone by showing how seven decades of unified urban identity shaped artistic imagination and cultural mythology around the city children call home.
Practical Information
The Deák17 Gallery sits in the heart of Budapest’s 5th district on Deák Ferenc Street, just minutes from Deák Ferenc tér—the city’s central metro hub where all three metro lines intersect. The location makes it exceptionally accessible regardless of where you’re staying in Budapest. Numerous buses, trams, and trolleybuses also serve the area.
The gallery occupies the first floor of a typical downtown Budapest building. Look for doorbell number 7 at the street entrance. The intimate gallery space suits the exhibition’s theme perfectly—cozy enough to feel like exploring someone’s carefully curated personal collection, yet professionally organized to showcase each artwork properly.
Gallery hours typically run Tuesday through Sunday with afternoon opening times. Check the official website before visiting as Hungarian galleries sometimes close on Mondays and may have special hours during holidays. Admission is free, making this an accessible cultural experience that won’t strain travel budgets.
Plan to spend 45-90 minutes depending on your engagement level. If you simply walk through viewing illustrations, 45 minutes suffices. If you examine details closely, read available books, and interact with the puzzles and activities, you could easily spend two hours absorbed in this imaginative Budapest.
Combining with Other Activities
The Deák17 Gallery’s central location makes it perfect for combining with other downtown Budapest activities. The gallery sits just blocks from Váci Street shopping, the Danube promenade, and St. Stephen’s Basilica. You could easily visit the exhibition before or after exploring these major tourist areas without requiring additional transportation.
The nearby Ferenciek tere offers numerous restaurants and cafes perfect for pre- or post-exhibition meals. Consider visiting the gallery in the afternoon, then walking to the Danube embankment for sunset views over the river with Buda Castle rising on the opposite bank.
Families traveling with children should definitely prioritize this exhibition as a refreshing break from monument-heavy sightseeing. Children often struggle with extended walking tours and historical lectures, but this interactive gallery space allows them to engage with Budapest culture on their own terms while parents enjoy genuinely impressive contemporary art.
The Magic of Seeing Like a Child
This exhibition ultimately offers something precious and increasingly rare—permission to abandon adult logic and rediscover the creative freedom that makes childhood magical. In children’s illustrated Budapest, straight lines don’t connect two points, gray buildings don’t define the cityscape, and the rule that only birds see cities from above simply doesn’t apply.
The artwork invites you into universes where rust-belt industrial zones become adventure settings, where spacecraft park in the Danube just as naturally as boats, where past and present coexist without contradiction. The iconic M61 locomotive runs forever in these pages. Margaret Island grows a ladder to heaven. Whales discuss philosophy with apartment buildings.
Perhaps the exhibition’s deepest insight is this: a well-illustrated children’s book doesn’t just connect reality with dreamworld and link gray adults with colorful children—it plays freely with space and time, creating alternative universes where imagination rules and anything becomes possible. In these illustrated versions of Budapest, the city stops being a complex urban machine and becomes instead exactly what children perceive—a playground built specifically for their joy and discovery.
Whether you visit as an art enthusiast, a parent seeking family-friendly activities, someone interested in Hungarian culture, or simply a traveler wanting to see Budapest from an entirely new perspective, this exhibition at Deák17 Gallery offers a genuinely unique experience. It celebrates 75 years of Greater Budapest by showing us the city that matters most—not the one appearing on maps and in guidebooks, but the one living vividly in young imaginations where magic still happens and anything remains possible.