SHIFTS

SHIFTS

Permanent Exhibition of Hungarian Art after 1945 at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Shifts

Shifts With Explanatory Texts by Zsolt Petrรกnyi, curator of the Permanent Exhibition of Hungarian Art after 1945 at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest 2017

SHIFTS

Shifts. Permanent exhibition of Hungarian art after 1945 at the Hungarian National Gallery Exhibition open from 12 October 2013 Publications of the Hungarian National Gallery 2017/3 Series editor: Judit Borus Curator of the exhibition: Zsolt Petrányi Layout: András Ravasz Editor: Judit Borus Copy editor: Eszter Kardos Translator: Steve Kane Photo: Katalin Fehér, Péter Makkai Editorial coordination: Judit Tóth Reproduction rights: Éva Kovács Special thanks to Mária Madár, György Orbán Printed by Printpix Nyomda Published by László Baán Director General Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 2017

© HUNGART © 2017 © György Galántai © Lajos Kassák © Balázs Kicsiny © Béla Kondor © Dóra Maurer © Zsolt Petrányi, 2017 © Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 2017 ISBN 978-963-9964-09-9 ISSN 0864-7291 On the cover: János Fodor: Snooze Sheet, 2008 Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Contents

Introduction Gyula Pauer: Maya and György Jovánovics: Man Post-Surrealist Tendencies Socialist Realism and Afterwards From Surnaturalism to the Influence of Pop Art Iparterv Avant-garde Directions in the 1970s Conceptual Art and Photorealism The Art of the 1980s: “New Sensibility” and Underground After the Fall of Communism Art in the New Millennium – Points of Reference and Memory Constructions, Machines and Structures The Works in the Dome List of Exhibited Works (as featured in the first incarnation of Shifts, from 12 October 2013)

7 11 15 21 27 33 39 45 51 57 63 69 75 78

Introduction

The history of Hungarian art after 1945 is comprised of the Ĺ“uvres of inextricably interrelated generations, of artists who gravitated into groups, and of others who determinedly pursued their own individual paths. Their careers were greatly influenced by the institutional systems of their times, but also by the exhibitions in which they expounded on their principles.

This exhibition aims to provide an overview of this period from three different aspects: firstly, we outline the different trends and movements that flourished side by side; secondly, we highlight the key role played by exhibitions as an integral part of the art historical process; and thirdly, through representative works, we point out some of the threads that linked Hungarian art to contemporaneous trends in European art.

One of the characteristics of Hungarian art after 1945 is its wide palette of diverse yet coexisting movements and approaches to art; each innovation, rather than supplanting what had gone before, added a new facet to the Hungarian art scene. Examples of this are abstract art, which developed by building upon the art of earlier generations, and the post-surrealist styles, which revived the avantgarde tradition of experimentation, local interpretations of which emerged as counterpoints to official art. Their parallel histories can be traced almost uninterruptedly throughout the past few decades.

The significance of exhibitions as defining moments in art history comes under the spotlight at several points of this show. Exhibitions resonate beyond their own particular time when they reveal commonalities of principle and attitude among artists, rather than the closeness or otherness of their styles and techniques. This can give us greater insight into the many different phenomena and events that take place, for the focus shifts from a mostly stylistic approach to one that underscores conceptual and theoretical links.

It is particularly instructive to observe the stylistic similarities and differences among the artistic practices of the 1960s, 70s and 80s: throughout the earlier decades of this period, much of the dialogue took place between avant-garde pursuits and versions of modernism that were tolerated by socialism; in the 1980s, however, a new type of expressive painting came to the fore, inspired by international trends, which existed alongside the underground activities prevalent among artists of the youngest generation. This exhibition not only demonstrates how the creative approaches of progressive artists in Hungary were related to the European and American movements of the day, but also illustrates several of

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the unique and outstanding artistic achievements that sprouted from Hungary’s own historical and cultural context.

Although the Hungarian National Gallery was founded in 1957, it was not until 1975 – when the institution moved to Buda Castle and a major exhibition of works from the collection was held – that the Hungarian Contemporary Art Department (later called the Contemporary Collection, now the Department of Hungarian Art after 1945) came into being. The Gallery’s director at the time, Ö. Gábor Pogány, was instrumental in establishing the department.

The Gallery has collected contemporary artworks since its foundation, initially limiting its new acquisitions to those that complied with official state cultural policy. This practice began to change in the 1980s, when the department’s art experts were given ever increasing power to decide what purchases to make.

The Department of Hungarian Art after 1945 now boasts a collection numbering over 11,000 works, which is the most comprehensive collection of Hungarian art from the last seventy years.

The title of the permanent exhibition, Shifts, calls attention to the ways in which approaches to art have changed over time, to the evolving role of the market in the re-evaluation of art, and to the reforms enacted in the system of institutions.

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Gyula Pauer: Maya and György Jovánovics: Man

The introductory room leading into the exhibition is centred around two sculptures, made ten years apart from each other. They are included for two reasons: firstly, these works previously appeared together at an exhibition held in 1980; and secondly, the artists who produced these sculptures were exponents of the avant-garde endeavours of the 1970s, which no overview of Hungarian art from the past seventy years can afford to ignore, for this period continues to exert an influence on the art of today. Both these works represented universal values in their respective periods, as their creators sought ways to express free thinking in art during the highly controlled decades of communism.

In its portrayal of the human figure, György Jovánovics’s work explores the complexity of representation: the Bourbon fleur-de-lis motifs on the fragile plaster surface, the plaster mould and the textile that constitutes an integral part of the sculpture refer to the historical and existential aspects of being. Miklós Erdély, artist, writer and theorist, and perhaps the greatest influence on Hungarian art in the 1970s, wrote about this work, “Between the ostentatiously naked face and the lower body covered by the skirt, hangs this shiny weight, the real silken scarf – resignation itself. The high degree of risk is not just momentary, like in a circus, but life-long, like in art.”

Gyula Pauer’s Maya is a log carved into the shape of a female body and then covered with photographic imagery of a naked woman wrapped in drapery. This statue poses questions about appearance and about the uncertainty that we feel when we look at it: we cannot figure out exactly how it was made or what it depicts. Pauer called works of this type pseudo works, and he made a number of pieces with similar surfaces during his career. Inspired by Eastern philosophies, he named the work after Maya, the Hindu goddess of illusion. When completed, Maya became the subject of many of Pauer’s lectures and performances. The veil on the sculpture acts as a means of partially concealing, partially revealing the figure beneath it. The crack along the front of the sculpture appeared shortly after Pauer had completed the work, and he considered it a genuine part of the statue.

As he concluded in his artistic programme, “We would like you sometimes to forget that this ARTISTIC REALITY is an IMAGE and to believe that it is REAL REALITY.”

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Gyula Pauer (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Maya, 1978

Gyula Pauer belonged to the outstanding neo-avant-garde generation who began to breathe new life into Hungary’s artistic discourse in the late 1960s, influencing the approaches and working methods of younger artists with a potency that can still be felt today. Pauer was recognised not only as a visual artist but also as a set designer, and he earned accolades from his peers for several of his film and stage sets. He was greatly influenced by theatrical illusion and by the performing arts themselves. One of the most important issues he dealt with concerned questions of illusion. He coined the term “pseudo” to describe his experiments with surfaces, in which he generated the semblance of features – creases or rough textures – that differed from those actually possessed by the materials he worked with. He achieved these effects by applying printed, photographic or spray-painted surfaces to the exteriors of his sculptures.

The sculpture entitled Maya was one of the models for these experiments, and an important player in the artist’s performances. In Hinduism, Maya was the ancestral mother of the entire universe, and is a symbol for illusion, while her veil conceals reality from human senses – this is referred to by the title of the work and also by the veil covering the sculpture. The mannequin-like figure was carved out of wood; textiles were wrapped around a nude live model and then spray-painted, creases and all; the pre-painted textiles were then glued to the figure, producing a sculpture that gives viewers the illusion that they are looking at a realistic female figure. The crack in the wood is an integral part of the work, deliberately exposing the dissimilarity between illusion and reality.

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Gyula Pauer: Maya and György Jovánovics: Man

György Jovánovics (Budapest, 1939) Man, 1968

Ever since the days of Ancient Egypt, the standing human figure has been a constant source of inspiration for sculptors. In the twentieth century, exponents of avant-garde movements produced all sorts of radical abstractions of this fundamental form, incorporating various symbols and references, and sometimes deviating entirely from anatomical accuracy. Jovánovics, by contrast, always strove to achieve a vivid and recognisable portrayal of the human body and experimented instead on the use of different materials. He made a number of ventures into this experimental realm, and the piece shown here, which featured at the landmark Iparterv exhibition, is perhaps the most important of his results.

Working in plaster cast, the artist generated the effect of delicate fabric on the man’s clothing, while he covered the face with a web-like pattern of fleurs-de-lis, a motif commonly used in classical art. The appearance is accentuated by the silk scarf tied around the figure’s neck. Although plaster is generally used in sculpture only for modelling and not for the finished work, here it was perfectly suited to Jovánovics’s intent – compared with the permanence of marble or bronze, the fragile nature of the material used for this sculpture underlines the sense of transience and mortality.

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Post-Surrealist Tendencies

At the end of the 1960s, when work was well under way to move the Hungarian National Gallery to Buda Castle, the then-director Ö. Gábor Pogány presented a series of arguments in support of setting aside space to exhibit contemporary Hungarian art. One such argument, when referring to Hungarian art after World War II, pointed out that alongside state-sanctioned styles and movements, there was also a great amount of merit in the independent, post-surrealist styles.

Pogány’s opinion also demonstrates that after 1945, the views of the pre-war generation still survived, being most apparent in their estimation that the most valuable definition of art lay in the crossover of surrealism and abstraction. In 1947, in their book titled Revolution in Art, Béla Hamvas and Katalin Kemény defined surrealism in these terms: “What is the surrealist artist’s method of creation?

First of all, they strive to overcome all the inhibitions and suppressions of their waking consciousness and to allow the deep consciousness unfold in what they call the dream state. The surrealist artist sees all the content of waking consciousness as a mischief of the intellect, in other words, simply as intellectual, moral and social (that is, school-bookish) propaganda. The waking consciousness has one single purpose: practically, to find orientation ‘in life’. The surrealist artist has a higher purpose. As Herbert Read says, the purpose is to draw a full bucket from the depths and heights of the human soul.”

Hungarian post-surrealism is a peculiar take on a style, and manifests itself in many artistic positions up to the mid-1970s. This section of the exhibition presents three decades of the style from the late 1940s (starting with the group of artists known as the European School), demonstrating how the style endured amid the dictatorial and then the more open cultural policies of the 1950s and 1960s as a counterpole to propaganda, and later to modernist art.

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György Konecsni (Kiskunmajsa, 1908 – Budapest, 1970) Hunting, 1960–1970

Konecsni was an artist of immense versatility: advertising graphic designer, painter, book illustrator, and he was even responsible for decorating the famous upstairs bar at the Fészek Art Club. His innovations betray both a sense of playfulness and a certain anxiety. In the 1960s, he produced paintings featuring frightening surrealistic creatures, whose sombre colours stand in sharp contrast to the vitality of his posters.

The work titled Hunting is reminiscent of a cave drawing, and shows indistinct, primitive stick figures chasing after their prey, which can also only vaguely be made out. In this painting Konecsni employed Jackson Pollock’s dripping technique, the difference being that whereas the American artist used it to arrive at a completely autonomous and hitherto unknown form of abstraction, the Hungarian arrived at figuration. The dense network of dripped white lines of paint recalls the cracks in a cave wall, while the black shapes that emerge from them imitate the marks of running figures. In this painting the artist makes reference to the prehistoric drawings that inspired surrealism; to a mythical world where people lived in closer harmony with animals and with nature in general, and hoped – at least in our imagination – that they might exert some influence over the world around them by drawing on their cave walls.

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Post-Surrealist Tendencies

Dezső Korniss (Bistrița [today Romania], 1908 – Budapest, 1984) Composition with Kite, 1947

Dezső Korniss began his career in the 1930s, and it was he – together with Lajos Vajda – who provided the driving inspiration for the artists’ colony in Szentendre. His world of motifs drew from Hungarian folk art and from surrealism, and in his works he explored the boundary between figuration and abstraction, occupying a zone in which associations are generated at the same time as concrete illusions of the spectacle are abandoned.

At first sight, his Composition with Kite would appear to be merely a well-balanced composition built on contrasts of colour. Closer inspection of the shapes, however, reveals the presence of a few symbolic elements that indicate we are witnessing two imaginary figures, one of whom seems about to strike the other with an enormous, sail-like arm. The mask in the picture was a popular motif among the artists of the group known as the European School, of which Korniss was a member. The history of using African masks in twentieth-century European art can be traced back to the earliest days of cubism. The European School was disbanded in 1948, and Korniss spent the 1950s working in isolation – referred to at the time as “internal exile”. In the 1960s he was allowed back into the fold and even received a few commissions for public works. Like Jenő Barcsay, he moved increasingly towards abstraction in the 1970s, but his art retained a unique character through his use of calligraphy and lettering.

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Margit Anna (Borota, 1913 – Budapest, 1991) Hanged Puppet, 1955

For most of her life, the artist’s output bore the indelible imprint cast by the loss of her husband and fellow painter, Imre Ámos. Their life together began in 1936. The next year in Paris they met Marc Chagall, who provided both of them with artistic stimulation. Ámos died in 1944 at a forced labour camp, and from this point on, the puppet became the dominant form in Margit Anna’s art. She lived in Szentendre, and her works became imbued with the motifs and spirit of the town. Several resident artists, Endre Bálint and Lajos Vajda among them, found inspiration in the local Serbian Orthodox icons, whose frontal, chest-length view, symmetrical arrangement and heavy stylisation fuelled new experimentation in picture-making.

Margit Anna’s painting follows the same pattern, and the black line drawing on the red background, together with the white surface of the figure, achieves a dramatic effect. The figure in the painting appears before us as a portrait, and in its roughly drawn lines, we can see the grotesque face of a puppet, staring blankly yet with the power to arouse emotions. The work is about a person standing alone. Its surrealism derives from its transformation: a flesh-and-blood character has been transcribed into a figure that is merely a plaything, vulnerable to the turmoil of history and to psychological impulses.

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Post-Surrealist Tendencies

Endre Bálint (Budapest, 1914 – Budapest, 1986) Oh, It Is No Fun to Saw, 1971

Bálint’s art was inspired by the multicultural town of Szentendre, with its Serbian, Hungarian and Jewish traditions, customs and visualities. When creating his works, he would often begin by assembling found objects, wooden components and planks, and then complete them by painting details onto them. Putting different elements together in random new ways is a method used by futurist, dadaist and surrealist artists, whose surprising combinations would provoke new associations of imagination and awaken memories, enriching both the artist and the viewer with unexpected realisations.

Even the title, Oh, It Is No Fun To Saw, is humorous in its contradiction, parodying the unpleasantness of doing hard work, and referring to the trials and tribulations involved in putting the wooden panels together while making the work. Due to the techniques employed in its creation, this work, despite its small size, operates on multiple levels: it simultaneously represents how a discarded piece of furniture can be reused and supplemented with some braided string, conveys – through its painted motifs – the memories and cultural milieu of Szentendre and the artist’s life, and – through the lines scratched into it – reveals the artistic potential in the technical games invented by the surrealists. This item from Bálint’s rich and bounteous life’s work is a perfect illustration of his working method, which is typified by collages made from paper cut-outs or larger iconostasis compilations.

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Socialist Realism and Afterwards

In the 1950s, the ideological and stylistic requirements prescribed by the cultural policy of the dictatorial one-party system made socialist realism, considered by experts as a side-track in twentieth-century art, officially the exclusive style in Hungarian art.

This forced some artists to pursue parallel practices in their work, while avantgarde artists, those whose concept of art differed from the official line, turned away from the art scene and worked in internal exile. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin’s death (1953) brought some softening in the cultural policy, and after the 1956 revolution, cultural policy became somewhat more open. According to a decree passed by the 1957 conference of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, “We must pursue a carefully planned, high-level ideological fight against the bourgeois and counter-revolutionary tendencies and the ideological chaos that are still very markedly present in the ideological sphere. In the fields of art, we must primarily support socialist-realist works, which are in line with our ideology.

We must foster the progress of our art and literature towards socialist realism. We must also leave space for other progressive trends, obviously, reserving the right to criticise them.”

The last sentence of the quote above marked the dawn of a new age in cultural policy. Over time it led, among other things, to the division of art into the categories, of “supported, tolerated and forbidden”, which, in turn, resulted in the parallel existence of state-approved and more unofficial, progressive practices.

A characteristically Eastern European version of modernism emerged here, which broke away from the language of socialist realism, but also distanced itself from the progressive trends of the twentieth century, and strove to create a language appropriate to the realities of the 1960s and 1970s. Those pursuing this path dealt with ideologically acceptable themes, while in their visual language they attempted to assimilate one or more of the different “isms”. It was also during this period of relaxation in official cultural policy that a new post-war avant-garde generation emerged on the scene, whose experimental works were inspired by the latest abstract and figurative trends in Europe. These artists relied on foreign albums, magazines and other types of written and illustrated records for information, which were difficult to come by in Hungary at the time.

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Stalin Monument Competition (photo documentation), 1949 Participating artists: György Baksa Soós, Lajos Bartha, András Beck, Dezső Bokros Birman, Géza Csorba, Béni Ferenczy, Károly Hampl, Jenő Kerényi, Ferenc Medgyessy, Sándor Mikus, István Szabó, Márk Vedres, Tibor Vilt

The idea of erecting a statue of Stalin, the Soviet party leader and president, who was also the focus of a powerful personality cult, was put forward almost as soon as the communists came to power in 1948. None of the works submitted in the first round of the competition proved satisfactory, but in the second round the jury selected the entry proposed by Sándor Mikus, which was erected in full size (eight metres tall) in Budapest’s City Park in 1951. A magnificent stepped base was added to the original plan, and a processional square was built around the statue for important functions such as military parades. Mikus’s work was demolished during the 1956 Revolution.

As can be seen from the names featuring in the photo documentation, artists who were already well established as sculptors before the communists took power were also among those invited to submit models, giving them the chance (or in some cases, forcing them) to demonstrate their commitment to the ideology of the one-party state. The styles in which the sculptors modelled their entries fully met the requirements of socialist realism, but they also reveal how uncertain the artists were when it came to depicting Stalin in a way that would also serve the purposes of party propaganda.

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Socialist Realism and Afterwards

Tibor Csernus (Kondoros, 1927 – Paris, 2007) People from Újpest (Újpest Wharf), 1957

As a pupil of Aurél Bernáth, Csernus adopted his master’s view that naturalism was the prime tradition in Hungarian painting. Throughout his career, he undertook several experiments to introduce innovations into this tradition, and beginning in the mid-1950s, whilst carefully sticking with subjects that complied with the state-approved ideology, he attempted to keep step with the latest tendencies in international at. In the 1960s he became the leader of the surnaturalists. In 1964 he emigrated to Paris; from the 1970s he was influenced by hyperrealism, and eventually he turned to a variant of realism that was based on dramatic, Caravaggesque chiaroscuro.

People from Újpest (Újpest Wharf) was painted in 1957, and was displayed at the first major exhibition after the Revolution of 1956, at the Spring Show held in the Műcsarnok (Hall of Arts, on Budapest’s Heroes’ Square). Due to its structure, consisting of several different sections, each with its own jury, this show became the forum for more liberal means of expression. The painting shows young labourers having fun beside a stretch of the Danube to the north of Budapest’s Árpád Bridge; the lamps on the bridge are already alight, so it must be late afternoon. To evoke the gravelly surface, Csernus made use of the novel French technique of tachisme, in which parts of the surface of the dried paint are scraped away; this demonstrated an awareness of the latest developments in Western art, even as he kept his painting firmly centred on reality.

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Jenő Kerényi (Budapest, 1908 – Budapest, 1975) Genius (Liberation), ca. 1968

One of the most frequently commissioned sculptors of the 1960s, Jenő Kerényi developed a language of sculpture that combined socialist realist topoi with twentieth-century forms of expression. The theme of the work is fully in line with the cultural policy of the age: in socialism, Liberation Day meant the celebration of the end of World War II in Hungary, when the Soviet Army entered Hungary and expelled the last German troops from the country.

Named after its modern approach to the figure, which presented it as a mass rather than focusing on anatomical accuracy and realistic presentation, this style came to be called socialist modernism, or “socmodern”. This artistic practice represents the approach of the Kádár era (János Kádár was premier of Hungary between 1956 and 1988), where art was expected to express the spirit of the age by conveying ideologically determined and approved content in the language of twentieth-century art.

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Socialist Realism and Afterwards

Lajos Kassák (Nové Zámky [today Slovakia], 1887 – Budapest, 1967) Monumental, 1966

Lajos Kassák, poet, artist, organiser, and a major driving force behind the Hungarian avant-garde movement in the first half of the twentieth century, was not allowed to exhibit his artworks or publish his writings in the 1950s.

Although later generations of artists were nevertheless greatly influenced by his achievements, the broader general public was kept largely in the dark about his works. During this period, several leading figures from Hungary’s pre-war art scene were either banned by the authorities or chose to stay away from artistic activity, yet it was typically their silence that made them valuable points of reference in the eyes of younger artists.

Kassák’s painting before World War II was strongly influenced by the Russian avant-garde, in particular constructivism. His later works were characterised by a less rigid handling of form and a gentler approach to lines and colours. The work on show at this exhibition also comes from the period when he was out of the public eye due to the political situation.

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From Surnaturalism to the Influence of Pop Art

Although the term surnaturalism was coined to reflect its parallels with and differences from surrealism, the foundations of the movement’s artistic aims lay somewhere else entirely. In a 1966 study, the art critic Géza Perneczky described the main features of the style as follows: “Sur-naturalism … is a kind of painting with an irrational effect, although its technique is even more natural and academic than the figurations of surrealism, composed of realistic details … the school has somehow emerged from the dilemmas of the naturalistic (or plein-air type naturalistic) worldview, and in essence, it is an attempt to transcend this naturalism in an avant-garde experiment, which eventually still remains within the limits of naturalism.”

A loose association of painters, the surnaturalist group was mostly composed of former students of Aurél Bernáth at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. Their art was firmly rooted in the traditional naturalistic manner of painting but they strove to develop it further by exploring the immanent laws of the discipline. This duality also informed the name of the group: naturalistic in painting the details, but surrealistic in the overall effect. The progressive artists of the decade debuted in a group show titled Stúdió ’66, where the surnaturalists all exhibited their works in the same room. Their works represent a unique direction among the many concepts of art that emerged in the 1960s, and the surnaturalists spoke with the voice of a new generation, which resulted in pop art and art informel playing an important role in the Budapest art scene by the end of the decade. Besides being modernist and avant-garde, the surnaturalists created a painterly language of form that had few parallels in Europe, and this is among the reasons why they feature so prominently in this exhibition.

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Katalin Sylvester (Mezőtúr, 1929) Still Life, 1960–1964

Katalin Sylvester studied under Károly Koffán and Aurél Bernáth, so it was no surprise for her painterly vision to be dominated by an interest in rediscovering realism in her imagery. Through her husband, Tibor Csernus, she became closely associated with surnaturalism, although she only tangentially used this technique in the portraits and still lifes she produced in the early 1960s. Her tense, anxiety-ridden compositions depict an enclosed world in which the living is far from easy, and to a certain extent this reflects the increasingly restrictive political atmosphere that was closing in on the Csernus-Sylvester couple at the time. Their stay in Paris in 1957–1958 had been viewed with suspicion by the Hungarian authorities, so when Csernus was offered the chance to exhibit in the French capital’s Galerie Lambert in 1964, they took the decision to emigrate and settle there for good.

The painting on show here was made while they were still in Budapest: it shows a simple piece of furniture which has long been a standard item in artists’ studios: a wooden stand, piled with tubes of paint, bottles, brushes and an assortment of other accessories. The picture is overcome by vibrancy as the objects gradually emerge out of a complex and apparently impenetrable interplay of brushwork. Despite the realistic portrayal Sylvester has made of her surroundings and her objects, the style of painting she employs gives the work its special expressiveness. The tools of her trade seem to come alive, with their own feelings and passions – their only desire is to play a part in the creation of more and more works of art.

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From Surnaturalism to the Influence of Pop Art

László Lakner (Budapest, 1936) Polytechnic Instructional Cupboard, 1961

In Hungarian primary schools, “polytechnic instruction” was a practical subject intended to develop manual dexterity, and it introduced pupils to a variety of different tools and working processes. In the 1970s the name of the subject was changed to “practical education”, although the word “polytechnic” continued to be a better way of expressing the great range of different technical methods and tools in which students received training.

László Lakner painted an imaginary instructional cupboard, with a plethora of drawers, shelves and compartments that would have made it ideal for storing all kinds of tools, nails and wires. The picture places these diverse items into a constructed system, so what we get is a complete set that occupies the entire surface of the picture. Some of the tiny details are more or less identifiable, while others are just instances of virtuoso painting skills. The subject matter enabled the artist to express his interest in objects, and it also marked an important stage in the process by which the “surnaturalists” gradually relinquished their attachment to realism, which opened the path for pop art to appear in Hungary, just a few years later. In 1964, when this picture was painted, the leading figure among the surnaturalists, Tibor Csernus, left the country and settled in Paris with his wife, Katalin Sylvester. Lakner replaced him as the head of the group. Influenced by the latest experiments in art that he witnessed at first hand on his journeys to the West (Venice in 1964, Vienna in 1965 and Essen in 1968), Lakner turned increasingly towards the newer figurative and conceptual tendencies in art, of which pop art and concept art were just the beginning.

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Ákos Szabó (Budapest, 1936) Kitchen, 1961

This is a realistic portrayal of a kitchen, but without any human figures. Judging from how the utensils, vegetables and other food items are all laid out, however, we could easily imagine that the person getting ready to do the cooking has just left the frame of the image, and may return any moment. The items of furniture – the woodburning stove, the basin and the table – are quite the opposite of the 1960s cult for modernist kitchens, and rather recall the poverty-stricken world of post-war households; it is as though these items were selected in order to reflect actual circumstances.

This painting is interesting for the way in which the baroque cornucopia of cooking ingredients is depicted, almost homogeneously, across the entire surface of the work, and for the highly detailed brush handling. Just like Tibor Csernus, Ákos Szabó also studied under Aurél Bernáth, and he also learnt how to wipe away layers of thin pigment, using an eraser and a cloth, making masterly use of the surrealists’ technique in order to achieve the desired effect in paint. He simultaneously follows the historical tradition of portraying objects in art and a more experimental approach, resulting in works that depict the most obvious and ordinary things in a new and vibrant manner. In another parallel with Csernus, Szabó was also invited by the Galerie Lambert to move to Paris, and he has lived in France since 1965.

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From Surnaturalism to the Influence of Pop Art

László Gyémánt (Budapest, 1935) Cosmopolis, 1964

This painting lays bare the buildings and the neon-emblazoned firewalls of a dull grey city, and was made at the time when Hungarian painters were starting to take inspiration from pop art. In László Gyémánt’s view, popular goods are best expressed through a variety of brand names and logos: borrowing familiar inscriptions from adverts expresses an intention to elevate commerce to the rank of artistic subject matter. When looking at this painting it is important to bear in mind that, in the mid-sixties, these goods were known to most Hungarians by their name alone, so the inclusion of these brands in the cityscape makes the painting a reference to the neon jungles of “Western” metropolises.

The paradox in the painting is striking: the advertising hoardings are spread evenly across the restrained greyness of the urban buildings. Cosmopolis was an important milestone in the process of experimentation to create a Hungarian variant of pop art. The new movement was seen not as a technique, but as a theme, one that could even be incorporated into realist traditions, as long as proper references to consumerism were included.

Gyémánt’s career is characterised by expressive and convincing realism, and since the 1960s he has painted countless portraits, with those of jazz musicians being particularly eloquent.

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Iparterv

The exhibitions curated by art historian Péter Sinkovits at the headquarters of the industrial building design company Iparterv (Ipari Épülettervező Vállalat – Industrial Buildings Consulting Co.) in 1968 and 1969 played a key role in the history of Hungarian art. They summed up the experiments that had begun in the 1960s and opened the way for new movements and groups to break through in the 1970s. As opposed to the kind of modernism that was tolerated and supported by the cultural policy of the one-party system, as directed by Minister of Culture György Aczél, these exhibitions focused on artistic practices that represented cosmopolitan, European and American values. Works of pop art, art informel and hard edge lived perfectly well side-by-side on the walls of the exhibition space.

In the catalogue of the first exhibition, Sinkovits summarised his aims as follows: “The exhibition of these eleven young artists brings together the avant-garde experiments that ventured to establish a connection with the current trends in the art of the world. They had to introduce progressive art forms in a constructed environment where speaking of something new was received with mistrust.

Trying to use new voices after a long hiatus, it is not by accident that they came to be influenced by the most outstanding representatives of today’s European and American artists. It would be difficult to point out the continuities; in a way, they are the representatives of new traditions, reutilising the avant-garde endeavour, which produced some of the most outstanding works of European art.”

Based on available records, in this room we present works that were included in the first Iparterv exhibition and are now in our collection. The arrangement of the works is intended to demonstrate how the different styles, influenced by abstract art, art informel or pop art, represented the wide variety of achievements in European art, and manifested the progressive spirit of the age.

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Ilona Keserü (Pécs, 1933) Framed, 1968

This painting, from the first period in Ilona Keserü’s career, makes use of dynamic gestures to soften the composition. In this work, painted on a wooden panel and incorporating the frame itself as part of the picture, brushstrokes and chalk lines complement each other, tracing out sensitive, organic rhythms that produce an ethereal effect. The artist was a founding member of the Master School of Fine Arts in Pécs, in southern Hungary. Although she studied under László Bencze and István Szőnyi at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, she regards the Pécs-based artist Ferenc Martyn as her true master. In 1962–1963 she lived in Rome studying with the aid of an Italian state grant. The calligraphy she lighted upon in her initial works gradually developed into ever grander gestures.

The work shown here was produced when she was a member of the Iparterv group, shortly before she experienced a sharp change in style: in 1969, in a cemetery near Lake Balaton, she discovered some distinctive gravestones, whose convex, symmetrical shapes would inspire the next period in her œuvre. Ilona Keserü now began to apply textile reliefs to her paintings, recalling the graceful lines of these ancient tombstones. Framed was made before this turning point, however, and is a perfect example of the artist’s natural feel for lines and shapes, an interest that would continue throughout all the later stages of her life’s work.

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Iparterv

Tamás Szentjóby (Tamás St. Auby) (Fót, 1944) Portable Trench for Three, 1969

Hungary’s participation in the events that shook Prague in 1968 greatly unsettled the intelligentsia. Twelve years after Hungary’s own uprising of 1956, in the middle of apparent political consolidation and economic reforms, the invasion of Czechoslovakia made people realise that Soviet influence was far more powerful and pervasive than they had imagined. Hungary’s vulnerability was demonstrated by the fact that its government and its armed forces could be commanded to interfere in the internal affairs of a neighbouring country, even when the situation there had nothing to do with Hungary. In the 1960s Tamás Szentjóby wrote poetry and was active in radical art forms, organising happenings and creating Fluxus events. In 1969 he joined the Iparterv group, and it was during this period that he produced a number of works – including one titled Czechoslovak Radio – that were made in response to the Prague Spring and to the student strikes in Paris that same year.

The title of the work shown here, Portable Trench for Three, is dripping with irony: what we can see is a model of a purportedly defensive contrivance that can easily be carried to demonstrations, which clearly offers little protection against attack. The artist’s views and actions eventually drove him into exile in 1975. He spent many years living in Switzerland before returning to Budapest in 1991.

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Krisztián Frey (Budapest, 1929 – Zürich, 1997) 3180 (Camisole), 1966

Krisztián Frey’s work was defined by his search for the connection between text and image. As a self-taught artist with an exceptional feel for painting, he began to create experimental works in the 1960s that share parallels with the art of Cy Twombly and Willem de Kooning. He described his paintings as scriptal (written) works, bearing patterns made up of barely legible and even less intelligible writing scratched into the grey base tone of the paint. The rapid hand gestures, with their expressive intent, speak volumes about the processes and motivations at play within the artist’s personality.

The work titled 3180 incorporates a pink camisole, and therefore not only constitutes an important piece in early Hungarian pop art, but also reveals the artist’s awareness of the collage techniques used by his American counterparts. A companion piece to this work, which Frey made three years later in 1969, consists of a wooden drawing board covered in painted lettering, which is finished off with a pair of ladies shoes. The title of the later work – “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“Everything transient is but a parable”) – is taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and may refer to the message hidden within transience, the essence that lies behind change; this puts forward a multitude of possible meanings for the more enigmatically titled 3180.

36

Iparterv

Ludmil Siskov (Sofia [Bulgaria], 1936) Astronauts, 1969

The Cold War duel between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s culminated in the “space race�, when competition for technical superiority led the drive to explore beyond planet earth. The Russians took first blood with their Vostok programme in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, but the Americans fought back with the Apollo Moon Landing in 1969.

For the subject of his painting, Siskov chose the space walk as one of the most exciting media images of the age, and he used his own, unique, pop-art-influenced spray-gun technique to execute the work. The colourful setting, with its connotations of consumerism, elevates the figure of the astronaut into a veritable pop icon: more than just an acclamation of scientific development, this work celebrates the general faith in human progress that pervaded the 1960s, when the dream of space travel was just one of a plethora of utopian ideas that heralded the dawn of modern comfort and universal peace.

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Avant-garde Directions in the 1970s

After the Iparterv exhibitions (1968–1969), a new generation made its debut in Hungarian art in the early 1970s, while the one-party state consolidated its political power and continued to keep a close watch on art. Members of this generation considered themselves the inheritors of the early twentieth-century tradition of artistic experimentation, and sought new directions in the presentation of art, based on philosophy and on scientific theory. Following Umberto Eco’s tenet of the open work, they abandoned the conventions of easel painting and sculpture in favour of more ambiguous and ambitious forms of art, which empowered (or challenged) viewers to come up with their own personal interpretations. This was a radical view in the Hungarian and East European context of the decade.

A theoretician of the period, the art historian László Beke, defined this approach as follows: “If we can, nevertheless, talk about ‘progress’, it stems from the ‘exploratory’ nature of avant-garde art: the most important thing is to find something new.

It makes no sense to repeat what has already been created in art. The principle of thesis-antithesis, which is still present, is no longer manifested in a battle of movements and styles but in an increasingly radical rejection of the bourgeois, and in the emergence of various forms of anti-art … The avant-garde strategies to conquer the new can best be distinguished from one another according to their concept of the function of art, the two extremes being the one in the spirit of the tautological concept of ‘art is art’ and the other the slogan: ‘art must start to serve the people now!’.”

In this room, we present examples of the kind of objects and photographic artworks that were created in this period, as well as action art, body art and text-based works. The cultural milieu of the decade was characterised by a wide variety of innovative and progressive concepts existing alongside one another, all vying for attention against the backdrop of government-endorsed modernism; simultaneously with these developments, the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery was gradually being moved into the specially adapted rooms of Buda Castle.

39

Dóra Maurer (Budapest, 1937) I Would Become Rather a Bird 1–4, 1971

The work consists of four experimental pictures, all made with a printing plate specially developed by the artist, bearing the circular inscription (in Hungarian and in English): Inkább madár lennék I would become rather a bird.

The first picture shows the outline of the letters as though they were cut out of a single plate; the second is the positive image of the one before; the third is the imprint of the plate folded in half; while the fourth was made with the plate all crumpled up. In the late 1960s Maurer began to arrange her compositions in accordance with the rules of mathematics and geometry, repetition and reflection, and phase-shifting, and these tools have remained with her ever since. Combining artistic methods with those of science, she systematically searches for the limits of what art is able to depict; within these limits, the processes and media by which the images are produced – whether painting, print, photography or film – become the basis for making the work of art, depending on their own possibilities and restrictions.

The interesting technical aspect of this work is related to the process of phase-shifting: it shows, on a single sheet of paper, the different phases in the process of “destroying” (crumpling up) the plate and the imprint. Dóra Maurer began teaching in the 1970s – she is currently professor of interdisciplinary painting at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest – and she was a major influence on the generation of artists who grew up in the 1990s.

40

Avant-garde Directions in the 1970s

Gábor Altorjay (Budapest, 1946) Short Circuit Device, 1968

Since the mid-1960s Altorjay has never ceased to push the boundaries of how art is defined, expanding its genres and adding to its subject matter. In 1965 he founded the so-called Circle of Dumb Poets, and in 1966 he and Miklós Erdély organised the first “happening” in Hungary. That same year he emigrated to Cologne in Germany, where he found work as an assistant to Wolf Vostell. Altorjay’s works are heavily influenced by neoDadaism, Fluxus, and other neo-avant-garde movements.

His Short Circuit Device is a neo-Dadaist object consisting of a wallet, a switch and the German edition of Six Essays on Military Affairs by Chairman Mao, each of which is connected to an electric plug, and all contained in a wooden box. This work, composed of readymade elements, is an 1960s echo of the collage technique developed by the first Dadaists, in which different components generate a profusion of associations, and whose subject is humour and surprise, and the juxtaposition of items that have political or economic connotations. In 1968, when this work was produced, student protests in France had led to the widespread acceptance of a number of left-leaning ideas that were critical of capitalism and the bourgeois system; among them, the thoughts of Guy Debord and the Situationist International exerted a marked influence on the art world – and perhaps even on the object on show here.

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Gábor Attalai (Budapest, 1934 – Budapest, 2011) Making a Close Crop 3, 1970

In four colour photographic prints, placed side by side like a comic strip, the artist recorded four stages in the process of shaving his head using the lowest setting of a hair-clipper. This gesture has more than just aesthetic significance. Anybody who has ever done something like this will know that it brings about a change in your personality as well as in your appearance, your face looks different, and what is more, people look at you differently too. The close crop also has a deeper, more serious historical significance, however, for it was routinely carried out on convicts, criminals and prisoners of war: close-cropped hair was a mark of humiliation and a way of making everybody equal. Cutting off a person’s hair was a symbol of cutting a person off from civil society and their everyday identity – often permanently.

This personal action by the artist recalls similar retaliations carried out by the authorities, while the four photographs also document the performance-like alteration of his own body and identity. The directness in the artist’s method of cutting his hair provides an artistic allusion, for the stripes in his hair echo the coloured fields of abstract paintings and evoke the way in which constructivist artists created their images. Gábor Attalai was a graduate of the College of Applied Arts, and besides objects, performance and photography, he also experimented with textiles. He used the most diverse range of media in his works, and frequently tried out novel combinations of paintings, prints and photos.

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Avant-garde Directions in the 1970s

Endre Tót (Sümeg, 1937) Zero-Rain, 1971

Endre Tót’s œuvre focuses on the union of words and images, and his works are imbued with his unique humour, which for decades has been characterised by sharp irony. He started out in the 1960s as one of the most talented painters of his generation, but he gave up painting in the 1970s to concentrate on concept art. Many of his pieces are based on photographs in which the starting point is the artist, his face or one of his performances.

He commenced the series titled Nothing/ZerO and Rains/Gladnesses in the early 1970s, and he has continued adding to these series throughout his career. In his Gladnesses, each picture is accompanied by a sentence written, for example, on a banner, a poster, or the work itself. The sentences begin with the words “I’m glad” (in English, German or Hungarian) and are generally comments on what the artist was doing at the time the work was made.

Zero-Rain belongs to the Rains series, which were originally made using a typewriter to add letters and slashes (///) onto postcards showing views of Budapest. There are several pieces in the series, in a number of different versions, most of which divide the view into a rainy half and a rainless half. Tót posted some of these cards to his friends abroad, making him one of the earliest exponents of mail art in Eastern Europe. He moved to Germany in 1978 and has lived and worked in Cologne since 1980.

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Conceptual Art and Photorealism

In the 1970s, the global art scene was dominated by conceptual art, and Hungary was no exception: avant-garde artists searching for ways in which to present their philosophical ideas also turned to conceptualism. “Conceptual art emerged within art, in other words, it was the art of ideas, where the problem does not necessarily appear in the language of the visual, but is nevertheless manifested as a visual problem,” wrote Gyula Pauer, author of the sculpture titled Maya, on display in the introductory room of the exhibition. His sculpture is a good example of how this type of art was closely related to pictures that were made using photographic methods or painted to resemble photographs. When writing on the relationship between photography and conceptual art, László Beke observed, “In Hungary, art criticism in the 1950s had a superficial view of styles that represented an abstraction from the concrete image. Likewise, today’s styles labelled as photonaturalistic are looked upon with ignorance. In essence, the term ‘photorealistic’ is correct (although besides many synonyms, ‘new realism’ and ‘hyperrealism’ are used most frequently), however, there is a fundamental difference between painting the concrete spectacle, that is, the photo-like character of painting in the previous period and today. In those days, painters relied on the photo for help as they had to faithfully depict a spectacle that they would often only have one chance to see … Today, ‘faithfulness’ is primarily a question of technique, while the theme is immaterial, at least in the initial approach to a work. The essential question here is the problem of how to execute the mechanical transfer of the original spectacle, reality, in which the photograph plays the main role. Therefore, the photo-like character of hyperrealism is as much of a theoretical problem as the use of the photo in conceptual art.”

This section of the exhibition presents various types of conceptual works side by side in order to demonstrate the complexity of this movement and the diversity of its practices in various genres. Object-like works, photo-based pieces and photo-like paintings enter into a dialogue here that repeatedly poses the questions of “What is art?” and “How can art be defined in the context of an everchanging world?”

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László Fehér (Székesfehérvár, 1953) Subway 2, 1978

In Budapest, the second Metro line was opened to the public in two stages, in 1970 and 1973. As part of this investment, subways (in the sense of underground walkways) were built at almost all of the stations, with a uniform design. The flights of steps still look much the same today as they do in the painting. The black-and-white tones used in this picture are unusual for a work of painting – this is, after all, a medium that is inseparable from the use of colours. Yet if no colours are used, this must be the result of a conscious decision by the artist, which in this instance was his deliberate intention to imitate the style of documentary photos that was widespread at the time. With his depictions of ordinary commuters walking up and down the stairs, László Fehér was aiming for a realistic portrayal of everyday people, to show them as they are in real life and to present a true vision of the world around us. In the 1970s, documentary photography, as the name implies, strove to disclose reality in a factual way, as opposed to the propagandistic images in the press and on television, with their endlessly insistent messages about social and economic improvements.

This painting is an attempt to create a fine-art equivalent to this form of social criticism – whereas photography is instantaneous, painting, by its multi-layered nature, is the epitome of endurance, for a work in oils takes days or even weeks to complete. Fehér painted two versions of this subject, and he also painted two views of passengers on board the underground trains, as seen through the carriage windows. His style underwent a series of changes until the 1980s, when he discovered the theme that would carry him forward: the analysis of the complex system of relations between memory and history.

46

Conceptual Art and Photorealism

Kati Gulyás (Budapest, 1945) Movement – Motionless Movement 2, 1979

Starting in the early 1970s, the Savaria Museum in the Western Hungarian city of Szombathely organised several textile biennials, which became a successful forum for textile art. In 1975, the Textile Art Workshop was founded in Velem, a small village nearby, where artists were encouraged to experiment with new ways of using textiles.

The works of the artists as well as the workshop’s residency programme soon garnered international recognition.

Movement represented a new approach to working with textiles, and the method employed to produce this lifesize self-portrait – applying photography to the canvas – stretched the medium’s boundaries further than ever before. If you look closely, running along the width of the canvas at the height of the artist’s head, there is an electrocardiograph, the visual readout of the artist’s heartbeat appearing together with her external image.

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Károly Kelemen (Győr, 1948) Jackson Pollock in Action, 1978

Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 posed some fundamental questions about the philosophy of art and the art market. The young pop art pioneer Rauschenberg purchased a drawing by his well respected and highly sought-after older colleague, erased the pencil work, and exhibited it under his own name.

With this gesture, he undermined the values of the art market, and in the 1970s it exerted quite an influence on many artists, revolutionising the way art is conceived.

In his series titled Eraser Pictures Károly Kelemen continued the train of thought set in motion by Rauschenberg’s action, using photographs of well-known avant-garde artists as the basis of his paintings – in this case the image shows Jackson Pollock in the process of dripping paint onto his canvas. The act of “erasing” the image emphasises how much more freedom there is in painting than in photography, for on the surface of the canvas anything at all can happen – and that includes producing a work out of the idea that a photograph, the person in it and the gesture that the person is making can all be wiped out at the stroke of a brush. Kelemen’s criticism is the self-determination of the new generation, and has the objective of moving on from the art of the past.

An artist who obliterates the work of another artist creates something new of his own, which has just as much worth as what went before it. Kelemen arrived at his own distinctive, eclectic style in the 1980s, and was one of that decade’s most important figures in the new trends of painting.

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Conceptual Art and Photorealism

István Nyári (Budapest, 1952) Artist Guards, 1977

This work focuses on a fundamental question of photorealism: when a picture shows a painted version of a blown-up photographic slide, are we looking at reality or at a figment of the artist’s imagination? In this case our doubts are not without foundation, for the work shows a green Mercedes police car parked by the side of the road, while behind it, with two police officers standing by its side, can be seen the front of a GAZ-13 Chaika, a Soviet-made limousine commonly used in those days to transport members of the political elite. The word along the side of the Mercedes does not say Police (Rendőrség = literally “Order Guards”), but “Artist Guards” (Művészőrség), so we are right to question the reality of what we can see. This work is a perfect illustration of the multi-layered relationship between art and the world portrayed by art, because the mystery can be solved, at least in part. The work has its basis in reality, for in the 1970s and 1980s the Budapest Police Force had a Mercedes that was used to lead convoys of politicians.

In this picture, the two vehicles are parked in front of the famous Clara Rotschild fashion salon on the capital’s elegant Váci Street; the wife of an Eastern European diplomat is buying some clothes inside the shop while the government-assigned vehicles and their chauffeurs wait outside. In this situation the “Artist Guards” on the side of the car is meant ironically, implying that artists should enjoy the same privileges as those proffered to politicians. The virtuoso photorealism would remain one of the distinctive attributes in István Nyári’s art, although later he used it to give a new form of expression to kitsch and surreality.

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The Art of the 1980s: “New Sensibility” and Underground

The definitive term of the 1980s, New Sensibility was the title given to a series of exhibitions, the first of which was held in 1981. In 1983 Lóránd Hegyi, the curator of these exhibitions, defined what their title meant: “I use the term ‘new sensibility’ as a general category encompassing all the artistic phenomena that came about in the last third of the 1970s, which led, through a variety of different influences as well as new trends in sociopsychology and lifestyle, to a fundamental and complex change in the approach to art that is still far from over. The essential component of this change is radical subjectivisation, coupled with a far-reaching retreat of the accepted notion of the role played by art in society.”

Although this subjectivism manifested itself mostly in the kind of painting that used expressive gestures, the art of the 1980s was also shaped by other influences. As Hungary’s socialist regime eased its grip, the youth derived inspiration from foreign underground movements (anarchism, punk, industrial aesthetics), whose imagery soon found its way into the art of the day, especially among more radical communities who exhibited regularly, such as the Lajos Vajda Studio in Szentendre or the Studio of Young Artists in Budapest. In a wide variety of forms, art now expressed a desire to break away from conceptualism and to reignite sensibility, although without entirely abandoning the meditative, analytical practice of art. The political atmosphere of the age was characterised by slow but inexorable liberalisation, which resulted in the language of art also becoming more versatile and colourful. Although “new sensibility” reaped almost instant success in exhibition halls in Hungary and abroad, many artists who began their careers in the 1980s preferred to define the status of an “artwork” rather differently from how sellable it was.

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János Szirtes (Budapest, 1954) Six Syllables, 1985

Unlike the precise, philosophical approach of photorealist and conceptual artists just a few years earlier, painting in the first years of the 1980s was built on large, colourful gestures and symbols referring to different cultures.

It is no coincidence that the art of that decade was given the epithet of postmodern, for this indicated that the type of art that had spanned the entire twentieth century, based on utopias and on expanding the concept of what could be defined as art, was no longer viable or sustainable. The “new” painting is therefore more difficult to interpret, as it acts upon our senses, expressing the artist’s emotions in the language of grand, painterly gestures – János Szirtes’s large, freely hanging painted canvas is a good example of this.

With this expansive, curtain-like surface, Szirtes aimed to evoke the elemental nature of painting and announced his intention to break away from its pure, modernist conventions. Nevertheless, closer observation will reveal that the streaks and strokes, applied in all kinds of colours, make up multiple layers and emerge as self-standing outlines or decorative motifs. Among them there is one that is figurative: amidst the dense, chaotic patterning, the careful eye can make out prehistoric creatures or dinosaurs. The title may be a reference to the six holy syllables of Buddhism (Om, Ma, Ni, Pad, Me, Hum), which represent the realms of existence, but the actual significance may remain an unanswered question. Whatever the fact of the matter may be, the painting attempts, in its own way, to express how different historical periods and eastern and western cultures intermingle and influence each other in the hurdy-gurdy maelstrom of the late twentieth-century world. Starting in the 1980s, Szirtes not only painted but also staged performances and produced video artworks.

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The Art of the 1980s: “New Sensibility” and Underground

János Sugár (Budapest, 1958) Very Sick, 1986/2010

János Sugár, as a student of Miklós Erdély, deals with the philosophical issues underlying art and investigates the possibilities of conveying art using different platforms. He executes his works in the most diverse range of media, in installations, graffiti, video art or even advertising surfaces.

His works on display here were made in an early period of computer image-making programs, in the mid-1980s.

The motifs he uses reflect the way people thought about images in those days, so they are personal, playful and ironic. They generate unexpected, poetic pictorial connections, supplemented by texts. Their surfaces preserve the technical limitations of the time, and the low resolution jolts the elements into fragments. Among the computer experiments that were conducted then, this series is steadfast in its belief in the transferability of images into other media, and is grounded in a graphic artist’s way of thinking, yet it bears the hallmarks of a futuristic technology.

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Ákos Birkás (Budapest, 1941) Head 25, 1987

Painting is defined not only by the theme or subject of the work, but also by its means of expression – this is why the history of painting still manages to surprise us with so many twists and turns. Each renewal of the genre is also influenced by the zeitgeist of each coming decade or period, because the theoretical character of art drives artists to enact ever newer changes. The 1980s were greatly influenced by the preceding “philosophical” decade, which had been shaped according to artistic concepts: the counter-reaction to this came in the gesturerich, wild painting of the 1980s. Birkás started out from a theoretical basis in his search for a kind of painting that was valid for his age, and devised a method that would simultaneously underline both the fundaments of art and the possibility of a kind of art that was expressive, colourful and sensuous. The guiding motif in his way of thinking is the “person”, the root – and therefore the subject – of all creativity, whose existence is determined by the head.

For several years beginning in 1984–1985, the subject of his paintings was the oval-shaped head, which he formed out of the thick layer of paint by making systematic, circular movements with his brush. To Birkás, however, the enclosed shape that resulted from this represented universality, the essence of the world, but it was too static and indivisible. He therefore perfected his method by only forming half of a head on each canvas and then fitting two paintings together, applying one over the other, thereby making the elliptical shape whole. “Unity” for him is thus comprised of two halves, two entities, and this opens up the meaning of his pictures towards the multitude of dichotomies that characterise our world, such as good and evil, man and woman, past and present – all of which together define the way we perceive the phenomena around us. Starting in the 1990s, Birkás altered his concept of the head by placing realist portraits side by side, before developing his painting further under the influence of socio-political media images.

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The Art of the 1980s: “New Sensibility” and Underground

István ef Zámbó (Salgótarján, 1950) Duckling with Pond, 1984

A new generation of artists began to make their mark in Hungary at the end of the 1970s; amidst an easing political climate, they turned to the underground of the English-speaking world for inspiration and experimented with punk and new wave, both of which were closely associated with visual art and image. The activities of these artists were significant because unlike the progressive artists of the day – who concentrated on conceptual movements – they turned their interest towards new phenomena. For them, art was inescapably interwoven into lifestyle, with experimental new music, image-creation, film-making and fashion all playing equally important parts. One such group of artists was based in the town of Szentendre, where they formed a band in 1979, called A. E. Bizottság. Several members of the band – including András Wahorn, Laca fe Lugossy and István ef Zámbó – not only performed as musicians but also painted as self-taught artists. Their art was built on the local traditions of the town and was inspired by the Hungarian post-surrealist painters, Endre Bálint, Imre Ámos, Dezső Korniss and Lajos Vajda. The works produced by this circle of artists featured a mix of motifs taken from elements of humour, fairytales, underground culture and contemporary visual arts. Their works are lyrical and based on associations of ideas, and they reveal a new approach to surreality, a blend of the young generation’s attitude towards life, a sense of absurdity surrounding the situation in Hungary at the time, and a certain political criticism, often spiked with humour.

This painting by István ef Zámbó is typical of this worldview: it brings motifs together in a juxtaposition that can truly be enjoyed when viewed with an open mind, and without attempting to find any associations that can be put into words.

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After the Fall of Communism

In the 1990s, the progress of art was largely affected by the collapse of the communist system in 1989 and the political changes that ensued. The generation that emerged in the early years of the new era enjoyed unrestricted access to information and freedom to travel, although this was also the period when Eastern European artists were unsure of their status, until they found a new direction.

While international interest in Hungarian art in the 1980s had been partly driven by the fact that it came from “behind the Iron Curtain”, in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, this interest waned. Artists who began their careers in the new decade had to build their visibility and reputation on totally new grounds.

With the liberalisation of the institutional system of art, the first private galleries appeared on the scene, the Studio of Young Artists became an independent forum, and curators emerged as the new experts in determining to content of exhibitions. Meanwhile, the differences between internal and external (that is, Hungarian and European) expectations generated a conflict of interests, as artists whose aim was to make a name for themselves on the international scene were often criticised at home for ignoring the local social context and not dealing with issues relevant to Hungary’s political and economic transition.

More importantly, however, the art of the 1990s began to deal with hitherto relatively ignored aspects of philosophy and social science, such as feminism and the postmodern. These new influences led to the emergence of new phenomena such as women’s art, personal mythologies, media art and technorealism, which appeared mostly in exhibitions and art criticism. Besides political, social and national identity, the accessibility of computer software also became a strong shaping factor, with image manipulation and computer-based art becoming symbols of the future. Meanwhile, the more traditional media of photography and painting turned to new themes and developed a visual language that reflected on the endless stream of images flooding from commercial television channels, magazines and, eventually, the internet. Even in the face of this onslaught, however, photography and painting managed to retain their traditional artisan character.

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György Galántai (Bikács, 1941) Shifts, 1989

Besides achieving great heights as an artist, György Galántai has long excelled as an indefatigable organiser of the Hungarian art scene. Between 1970 and 1973 he hosted a series of exhibitions held in a chapel in the village of Balatonboglár, next to Lake Balaton – for several years, participating artists pursued a neo-avant-garde programme, but such activities were rejected by the authorities, who imposed a ban on these shows. In 1979, Galántai founded Artpool, the largest archive of art in Eastern Europe, which he and Júlia Klaniczay have led ever since, continuously refining it and expanding it. Galántai was a pioneering Hungarian exponent of Fluxus art, mail art and media art, and his works share the same critical tone – his actions, paintings and sculptures all blend together philosophical content and humour.

This sculpture of his, which inspired the title of our exhibition, is a reflection on the political changes that took place in 1989 – the footprints, cut out of a thick sheet of metal, express how one long-accepted “way of walking” came to an end and was succeeded by another. The shift in step (i.e. the shift in the political paradigm) brought about radical changes in both economic policy and political communication, but in spite of this, individuals making their way through life – and indeed society as a whole – simply carry on following their own path through history, leaving a mark wherever they step.

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After the Fall of Communism

Endre Koronczi (Budapest, 1968) 193231NF41, 1993

The new generation of artists in the early 1990s sought to define their own directions and interests through a reinterpretation of different genres. Compared with the classical sensory values that had dominated painting in the previous decade, attention now turned to methods that were more philosophical, and artists typically took an interest in the question of “how”.

Endre Koronczi applied the paint to the surface of this work using the actual canvases that would eventually form the three-piece pictorial composition. The raw paint was arranged by the movement and interaction of the canvases being worked against each other. Koronczi called these creations “self-painting pictures”. The finished work comes about through a random mixing of colour, executed without the use of traditional tools (brushes). The complexity of the work lies in the mutual effects caused by the two touching surfaces and the paint in between them, and in the pictorial representation of applied pressure and physical motion.

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Zoltán Ádám (Budapest, 1959) Three Fountains, 1992

Zoltán Ádám belongs to the generation of artists who started out in the second half of the 1980s; they were not content to limit painting to the popular trends of the time, based on expressive, colourful and expansive gestures, but wanted to find theoretical handholds that would help them inject fresh life into painting. Ádám’s œuvre is characterised by lyricism, by eastern and western mysticism, by upending aesthetic categories and by unleashing the work of art from its conventional technical confines. Between 1990 and 1995 he was the leading figure in the Újlak group (named after a neighbourhood in Óbuda), whose members held ground-breaking, genre-fusing exhibitions, firstly in a local disused cinema (Újlak Cinema), and later in a former factory building in Tűzoltó Street across the river in Pest. During this period, Ádám took a brief break from painting and made a number of installations.

This work is a perfect illustration of his complex working method: he fixed together planks of wood he had found, and then chiselled lines into their combined surface, which gave a three-dimensional base to the picture that was completely unusual in painting. He applied colours to this surface, and then added a new layer of painted lines before chiselling out another pattern on top. The end result suggests the perspective of an inner space: the world of the studio and exhibition space in Tűzoltó Street. Through its technical complexity, the work is intended to show that there are still countless new creative means and possibilities available to painting, which makes this traditional medium potentially at least as experimental as the new media that were appearing in the 1980s and 1990s, such as video art and computer art.

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After the Fall of Communism

Dezső Szabó (Keszthely, 1967) Spot 7/1–6, 1999

Artists rekindled their interest in photography in the late 1990s partly as a result of the “digital revolution”.

A large number of them were deeply concerned by the question of what is actual and real in an image that can be easily manipulated by computer. A photograph was originally an imprint of light on film, and a reflection of reality, but a digital file, even if only the colours are changed, may no longer show the circumstances under which it was made.

Szabó came up with a perplexing solution to these problems: he takes his photos using analogue film, but the reality he captures is one that he has built himself out of models. He never manipulates the image, only the real world in front of the lens. In this series of his, we can see miniature crime scenes. Like other works by the artist, this series questions the veracity of the images we see in the media, the newspapers, on TV and on the internet.

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Art in the New Millennium – Points of Reference and Memory

The last section of the exhibition presents just a tiny slice of the types of art produced in Hungary since the turn of the millennium, encompassing installations as well as sculptures and wall-mounted pieces. Although there continues to be no shortage of new art with a political agenda, here we have selected works from the Hungarian National Gallery’s collection that explore the relationship between the past and the present. These works were inspired by an assortment of source materials: personal memories, concrete references, or the visual world of twentyfirst-century pop culture.

Taking a personal memory as the theme for a work of art can enable artists to summon up particular moments in their family’s history, often in order to present a social position or to take an emotional or spiritual stance. These works incorporate visual cues which not only reflect on something specific in the artist’s persona, but also prompt the viewer to conjure up memories of their own.

Another group of references consists of visual quotes that recall situations from art history, or from cultural history in general. In evoking images familiar from visual culture, but taking their own interests as their basic reference points, contemporary artists produce works that offer insight into the context and roots of the present (theirs and ours). Stories explored with this method contribute to the interpretative understanding of the past, tracing its connections with the present.

Besides working with motifs from the past, an exploration of the visual world around us can also help us to understand and formulate our present. Graffiti, cartoon figures, images from advertising or icons of pop culture – such ubiquitous and apparently commonplace imagery has a habit of appearing, directly or indirectly, in modern-day high art. Adopting and adapting pictures, drawings and symbols from other sources is one of the dominant practices in contemporary art, used by artists to leave an unmistakable and indelible record of the age in which they live and work.

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Albert Ádám (Veszprém, 1975) Never Take a Trip Alone, 2011

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt were two of the most influential figures in German, indeed global cultural history. The intellectual legacies of these two men, together with the history of seeing and representation, are investigated in this work by Ádám Albert, entitled Never Take a Trip Alone. The studies where the eminent German polymaths once worked in quiet seclusion – as symbolic monuments to their real and imaginary adventures – are recreated here in multiple forms, the most striking, perhaps, being the artist’s modern versions of perspective boxes (peepshows), which reached the height of their popularity in the seventeenth century. Looking through the peep-hole brings about a partial illusion of three-dimensional space.

The perspective box constitutes just one of the many stages in the history of visualisation. Albert juxtaposes this baroque invention with a more contemporary format, computer-based animation: here the sequence of images simulates the way in which a visitor to the scholars’ studies might actually look around, their eyes darting in all directions, taking in a wealth of information. The third layer added to Albert’s work takes the form of etchings, which give us a traditional perspectival depiction of the rooms, while the fourth is a two-piece coloured drawing, featuring Gothic typography, emphasising one emblematic item from each man’s study, a ladder and a telescope. This composite work, made of four different techniques, comfortably occupies the gallery space, combining to form a coherent installation in which all four pieces reflect on each other. The inscriptions on the paper-based drawings, pictorial surface and representational canon, explicitly refer to the historical scope involved in Albert’s work. Moreover, the contrast between the traditional perspective design of the etchings and the viewing position demanded by the perspective boxes sets up a referential grid from which to analyse the changing role of the canon in general, and each viewer in particular.

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Art in the New Millennium – Points of Reference and Memory

Marcell Esterházy (Budapest, 1977) Orthodromie, 2011

This work is a lenticular picture – it shows the spectacle from two different points of view. Marcell Esterházy made this work by cutting up two enlarged pictures and gluing the strips alongside each other.

Viewed from the left, the picture shows the artist’s paternal grandfather, the young Count Mátyás Esterházy (aged 16) in Hungarian ceremonial dress, complete with sword; viewed from the right, the image is of the same individual in a similar pose, but now a few years later, as an adult recently forced into exile. These pictures record two sharply contrasting periods of the artist’s grandfather’s life: born into an aristocratic family, he later became a professional translator who, as head of his family, cherished and took care of his loved ones; however, for a period of some twenty-five years, he also reported on his friends as a secret informer. People looking at this work – and therefore at Mátyás Esterházy – see a figure of uncertain form whose real nature can barely be inferred. They see someone who cannot be defined or categorised as good or bad, guilty or innocent, upstanding or tainted.

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Ottó Vincze (Kisvárda, 1964) The Bust Measure of a Constellation, 1997–2008

Ottó Vincze began his career in Szentendre in the 1980s as a self-taught artist. His creative interest initially focused on forms taken from postmodernism and on a reassessment of the traditions of European abstract painting, which resulted in works that clearly bore his own unique definition of painting. Early on, there was evidence of his intention to mix different types of code systems, and to contrast them with each other; in the 1990s this came to fruition in his use of sewing patterns as a basic design. The lines in them were replaced with soft, hammered tin threads, which were kept away from the wall by being placed on sticks. The complex systems formed in this way would manifest themselves in exhibition spaces simultaneously as an installation and as a sculptural drawing.

The work titled The Bust Measure of a Constellation was also produced using this technique: its central element is a sewing pattern, supplemented with a motif consisting of hundreds of buttons that recalls constellations of stars. The two elliptical components that form part of the installation were made using thermal images of comets, and are therefore references to astronomical documents. Connecting these two worlds together – sewing patterns and constellations – forms a conjunction of two meanings. The sewing pattern refers to the human body and to how a person’s identity is reflected in the kind of clothes they wear, while the constellations, as symbols of the world around us, are carriers of human cultural and historical heritage. As a coherent whole, the work unifies the dichotomies of the internal and the remote, the finite and the infinite, the mortal and the eternal; it is as though the artist were conducting an artistic exploration of the concept of the “inner universe”.

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Art in the New Millennium – Points of Reference and Memory

János Fodor (Budapest, 1975) Snooze Sheet, 2008

Fodor takes his inspiration from pop culture and street culture; with his works he reinterprets everyday objects, designs and motifs, and converts them into artworks. In addition to traditional visual art techniques, therefore, he also frequently resorts to manufacturing and duplicating processes, such as silk screen printing, concrete or polyurethane casting.

The drawing titled Snooze Sheet is also a reworking of popular icons, a kind of never-ending collection of motifs, in which a variety of comic-strip and cartoon characters – both existing ones and others generated by the artist’s own imagination – are presented in a network of interlinked layers. This is a work which, from a distance, appears as a highly detailed fabric of drawings; viewed close up, however, the surface of the paper reveals some remarkably unique, diverse and expressive figures. There was a drawing that once completely covered the toilet walls of the erstwhile Studio Gallery in Budapest, and this may be regarded as a possible forerunner to this work, for it was made up of similar motifs to those used in Snooze Sheet. The latter was drawn by Fodor over a period of several months, intending it as a surprise public artwork for visitors to the gallery’s exhibitions who needed to “wash their hands”. This work is akin to transforming images from our childhood memories into high art, for its disfigurations and personal commentaries have the effect of distorting these oft repeated figures in the same way that time alters events in our mind’s eye.

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Constructions, Machines, and Structures

Leading up towards – as well as away from – the exhibition of Hungarian art after 1945, this landing presents visitors with a thematically linked selection of works whose focus is on the mechanics, mathematics and architecture of constructions and contraptions.

Physical and technical ideas and experimentation played an important role in the art of Béla Kondor in the 1960s. He established a new type of creative world, taking inspiration for his particular interpretation of twentieth-century art from the Renaissance and from the art produced at the turn of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries. Following his lead, several other artists also explored mechanical-type structures, each in their own way, but all with the same fundamental spirit. Their approach was based either on geometry, taking an ironic or forward-looking view of the relationship between man and machine, or on abstract forms, with shapes and spatial structures modelled into autonomous sculptures. Under the socialist political system of the time, production was based on five-year plans and spectacular construction projects, but here, by contrast, was an artistic notion of constructing not as a political act but as one of inner motivation, characteristic of mankind as a whole. The common factor in these works and in the artists’ approach is that they define one of the cornerstones of human activity: work and creativity, in which the structure of the creation – be it architecture, construction or machine – is clearly visible.

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Tibor Szalai (Tét, 1958 – Budapest, 1998) Composition, 1995

Szalai was a talented member of the generation of architects who started out at the end of the 1970s, whose way of seeing things was shaped by his habit of working in several different genres at once. At university he experimented with the photographic technique of light painting, he staged performances and played music, and together with his fellow students he created pan-artistic events. He drew non-stop throughout his career, and in his images he combined architectural elements with biomorphic shapes. His architectural models demonstrate the crossover between architecture and the visual arts. He built perishable constructions out of white paper and cardboard; as an artist at the end of the twentieth century, he was searching for a spatial expression of the feeling pulsating throughout Hungary in the eighties and nineties of a country with an increasingly international outlook. Szalai used his works to communicate with the world, and he defined architecture as an area of research through which he could formulate his opinion about life, about the circumstances of living, and about the relationship between authority and the individual. His working method could easily be summed up by the rallying cry of the great Hungarian artist and writer of the early twentieth century, Lajos Kassák: “Destroy, so that you can build!” Szalai assembled his works out of strips of cardboard, apparently cut up at random, in shapes that allude to different origins, such as the curves of nature, Russian constructivism or the metropolitan aesthetic.

The work shown here, made from strips of wood, is one of the few that have survived. The monumentality that derives from its relatively large size underlines the tragically short-lived artist’s grand vision about the world and about the future.

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Constructions, Machines, and Structures

Judit Reigl (Kapuvár, 1923) Unfolding, 1975

Judit Reigl emigrated to France in 1950, and after a brief surrealist period, her works have long been characterised by their lyrical abstraction. She thinks in terms of series; this piece follows the procedures for composing classical music, using them as a metaphor in order to achieve new surface effects. The works in this series were inspired by The Art of Fugue, Johann Sebastian Bach’s experimental cycle, and following the great composer’s lead, Reigl devised innovative methods for both the composition and the structure of her paintings. Working on both sides of the canvas, she treated the rear with chemicals that seeped through the material to create patches on the acrylic paint applied to the front. The final effect was therefore generated by chemical processes – the artist combined a traditional approach to painting with an understanding of science and industry, resulting in the formation of surfaces conveying a complex expression of the industrial world of the 1970s.

The large work on show here is an abstract composition, and traces of the afore-mentioned material experiment can be seen in its central band. In the course of her work, Judit Reigl came up with images that reveal the organic processes that may arise when different substances are mixed together. It is as though we were looking at a river or at a field once covered in plants, while the shapes provoke free associations in the viewer’s mind and conjure up memories of nature.

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Béla Kondor (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) Drawing 2, 1969

Béla Kondor was the most outstanding talent of his generation, who circumvented the requirements of cultural policy in 1950s Hungary by declaring that the inspiration for his art came not from his immediate predecessors in the early twentieth century, but from the great authors of the early nineteenth century (such as William Blake) and from the Old Masters of painting (such as Rembrandt). Kondor experimented with prints, etchings and monotypes, and he also used photography as a medium with which he could create art in series. He was a versatile artist, adept at many different techniques, all of which he used in order to analyse his main themes from newer angles. Themes of fundamental importance to Kondor included portrayals of human mortality, the crudeness of technological achievements and fragile depictions of people at work and of couples.

The large work titled Drawing II is also experimental: he took a bare, unprimed canvas, the traditional support medium for oils, and on it, using broad, sweeping gestures, he made a charcoal drawing of a human figure, turning in on itself. The dramatic power of the expressive form derives from the large black surface that is built up from the different layers of lines in the drawing, which conceals the details so that the figure is barely discernible. The work is rendered monumental by virtue of being in monochrome, and it conveys Kondor’s complex message about the people of his own age and their lack of direction and purpose.

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Constructions, Machines, and Structures

János Megyik (Szolnok, 1938) Kötcse, 1988–1997

Since the 1970s János Megyik has produced his works in accordance with a consistent logic, which is focused on vision, perspective, geometry and the two- and three-dimensional projection of objects – in other words, the very question of representation. Artists since the Renaissance have searched for possible ways of doing this, examining the role played by mathematics and geometry in depicting the world around them and in recreating the spectacle as precisely as possible. In his artistic investigations, Megyik has come upon findings that he can use to present his personal standpoint in all manner of media, from drawings and photograms to wooden-stick constructions and cut metal sheets. His works are fusions of forms and discoveries from the fields of architecture and the visual arts.

The work titled Kötcse – the name of a village in southern Hungary (Somogy county) where the artist has spent much time – is a construction put together to reveal the perspectival lines of different viewpoints and projections. In this and similar works, the artist offers a unique visualisation of different lines (those of the spectacle, the perspectival structure and the viewer’s line of sight), so the method used to create such sculptures is sometimes referred to by art writers as “subjective geometry”. Due to the work’s theme, the cast shadows constitute an integral part of it, for the two-dimensional profile of the complex construction is constantly changing, depending on the type of lighting that falls upon it. The image of the shadow makes the work complete.

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Rudolf Rezső Berczeller (Trstená [today Slovakia], 1912 – Budapest, 1992) The Angels of the Apocalypse, 1990–1991

From the very start of his career, Rudolf Berczeller focused on sculptured stylisations of the human form.

With their geometrical contours and compositional arrangements, his figures convey the intimate connection between man and machine. Later in life, he used thin wire mesh to create three-dimensional human profiles, which took expressive shape while retaining their industrial character. The works that now hang from the dome of the Hungarian National Gallery were initially intended as part of an installation conceived by the artist for the former church in Budapest’s Kiscell Museum. If his plans for the exhibition had succeeded, the Angels of the Apocalypse, descending from Heaven, would have appeared above the heads of visitors in the monumental sacral space. The present configuration, while making optimal use of the dome’s unique characteristics, offers only a taste of Berczeller’s original grand vision.

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The Works in the Dome

The former royal palace in Buda Castle – the present-day home of the Hungarian National Gallery – sustained severe bomb damage during World War II. When it was reconstructed in the second half of the 1960s, the building was topped off with a taller, more prominent dome, and the interior designer of the palace, István Németh, transformed the imposing, modernist area beneath the dome into one of the most prestigious and uniquely ambient spaces in the museum.

An uncommon sense of sacral calm and grandiosity imbues this section of the gallery, which now plays host to three works of art produced by artists from three consecutive generations. The dialogue between the works arises from the fact that each of them – in its own, separate way – offers reflections on a similar theme: transience, death and associated notions. The monumental scale of the works combines with the character of the dome they occupy, and their location enhances their impact and amplifies their message. Even against the bold pattern of red and white limestone that dominates the interior design, the works act as three distinct symbols, reminding us of the most serious and fundamental questions of life.

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El Kazovsky (Leningrad, USSR [today Saint Petersburg, Russia], 1948 – Budapest, 2008) Installation, 2008

Intended for an exhibition at the Hungarian National Theatre, this monumental composition was designed by El Kazovsky just a few weeks before he died, so he never saw the finished work, which went on show later that year. It is a magnified version of a demon-like dog and its accompanying dancer, figures that recur throughout the artist’s œuvre. Towering over the spectator at a height of five metres, the figure evokes anxiety. The fusion of dream and reality reflects the artist’s view, while the enlarged dimensions, triggered by his serious illness, amplify this effect dramatically. The work is a meditation on death, evanescence and the related notions of faith and sacrifice.

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The Works in the Dome

Tibor Szervátiusz (Cluj [today Cluj-Napoca, Romania], 1930) Throne of Fire (The Execution of Dózsa), 1968–1972

Tibor Szervátiusz was born in the Romanian city of Cluj (now Cluj-Napoca) and he lived in Transylvania until 1977.

His interests as a sculptor lay in Hungarian folk art and peasant culture. Under the influence of his father, Jenő Szervátiusz, also a sculptor, Tibor Szervátiusz learnt to carve wood using local traditional forms. The monumental work titled Throne of Fire (The Execution of Dózsa) is an experimental piece welded together from individually crafted sections of metal. The skeletal figure depicted is György Dózsa, leader of the peasants’ revolt of 1514, who died a martyr’s death tied to a fiery metal “throne” with an iron “crown” placed on his head. We are shown the horrific result of his punishment, as remembered in folk tradition and immortalised in verse by the Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi. Szervátiusz worked on the sculpture for a number of years: his attention to detail and his choice of subject matter (Dózsa also originated from Transylvania) reflect both the sculptor’s isolation as a member of the Hungarian minority in Romania and the psychological effects of constant harassment by the Securitate (Romanian secret police).

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List of Exhibited Works (as featured in the first incarnation of Shifts, from 12 October 2013) Introduction Jovánovics, György (Budapest, 1939) Man, 1968 plaster; 186 × 78 × 64 cm inv. no. MM.82.133 Jovánovics, György (Budapest, 1939) Liza Wiathruck: Holos Graphos, 1976 Introduction; Chapter 1: The Garden and the Antimirrors 1–6; Chapter 2: Onimantia 7–18; Chapter 3: L. W. is Looking at L. W. Substantial Cataplexy, Catalepsy 19–45; Chapter 4: The Ideal 46–50; Chapter 5: The Building Material (Construction) 51–60 gelatin silver print, cardboard; introduction 940 × 700 mm each, chapters 1000 × 700 mm inv. no. MM.91.165.1–12

Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: Taking a plaster cast of Emma Imre, ca. 1978/1984 gelatin silver print on cardboard; each 119 × 89 mm inv. no. MM.2013.47.1–2 Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: The statue of Maya without veil, 1980 gelatin silver print on cardboard; 160 × 150 mm inv. no. MM.2013.56.1 Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: Maya unbound, 1980/1985 gelatin silver print on cardboard; each 270 × 180 mm inv. no. MM.2013.53.1–4 Post-Surrealist Tendencies

Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Maya, 1978 pigment and silk on wood; 160 × 50 × 25 cm inv. no. MM.82.132

Anna, Margit (Borota, 1913 – Budapest, 1991) Girl with a Red Ribbon, 1948 oil on cardboard; 45 × 35 cm inv. no. 75.71.T

Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: The story of the creation and presentation of the first figurative Pseudo statue in Nagyatád, summer, 1978, 1980 gelatin silver print on cardboard; 275 × 183 mm inv. no. MM.2013.25

Anna, Margit (Borota, 1913 – Budapest, 1991) Thinker, 1948 oil on cardboard; 60 × 46 cm inv. no. 75.72.T

Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: “Split Photos”, 1980 gelatin silver print on cardboard, thin photographic paper; 270 × 178 mm inv. no. MM.2013.27 Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: Maya (Green Stage, Benczúr Street), 1980 gelatin silver print on cardboard; 250 × 183 mm inv. no. MM.2013.28 Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: The story of the creation and presentation of the first figurative Pseudo statue in Nagyatád, summer, 1978 gelatin silver print on cardboard; 448 × 358 mm inv. no. MM.2013.30 Pauer, Gyula (Budapest, 1941 – Budapest, 2012) Photo documentation for Maya: Transformation into a chair, 1980 gelatin silver print on cardboard; 295 × 206 mm inv. no. MM.2013.37

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Anna Margit (Borota, 1913 – Budapest, 1991) Hanged Puppet, 1955 oil on paper mounted on cardboard; 28 × 20 cm inv. no. MM.85.10 Bálint, Endre (Budapest, 1914 – Budapest, 1986) Oh, It Is No Fun to Saw, 1971 oil on wood; 61 × 48.5 cm inv. no. MM.86.132 Bokros Birman, Dezső (Újpest, 1889 – Budapest, 1965) Ulysses, 1947 bronze; 20 × 15 × 13.5 cm inv. no. 69.16-N Gedő, Ilka (Budapest, 1921 – Budapest, 1985) Rose Garden with a Tower, 1971 oil on canvas; 62 × 45 cm inv. no. MM.83.295 Gyarmathy, Tihamér (Pécs, 1915 – Budapest, 2005) Dynamic Composition, 1946 oil on canvas; 130 × 196 cm inv. no. MM.82.247

Gyarmathy, Tihamér (Pécs, 1915 – Budapest, 2005) Memories of Playing, 1955 oil on wood; 54 × 44.5 cm inv. no. 69.121T Gyarmathy, Tihamér (Pécs, 1915 – Budapest, 2005) Solitude, 1957 oil on fibreboard; 42.5 × 52.5 cm inv. no. MM.83.297 Jakovits, József (Budapest, 1909 – Budapest, 1994) Green Wooden Headboard, Headboard for the Living, 1957 wood; 165 × 43 × 20 cm inv. no. MM.88.47 Jakovits, József (Budapest, 1909 – Budapest, 1994) Three Magi Ladder (Headboard), 1958 wood; 242 × 76 × 19 cm inv. no. MM.88.48 Jánossy, Ferenc (Budapest, 1926 – Balassagyarmat, 1983) Untitled, 1946 oil pastel on paper; 71 × 58 cm inv. no. MM.91.106 Jánossy, Ferenc (Budapest, 1926 – Balassagyarmat, 1983) Untitled, 1947 oil pastel on paper; 71 × 58 cm inv. no. MM.91.105 Konecsni, György (Kiskunmajsa, 1908 – Budapest, 1970) Masks, 1960–1965 enamel on plywood; 82 × 102 cm inv. no. MM.81.556 Konecsni, György (Kiskunmajsa, 1908 – Budapest, 1970) Hunting, 1960–1970 oil on canvas; 170 × 250 cm inv. no. MM.81.554 Korniss, Dezső (Bistrița [today Romania], 1908 – Budapest, 1984) Composition with Kite, 1947 oil on canvas; 95 × 115 cm inv. no. MM.85.97 Korniss, Dezső (Bistrița [today Romania], 1908 – Budapest, 1984) Antithesis II, 1947 oil on canvas; 126 × 48 cm inv. no. 66.67T Lossonczy, Tamás (Budapest, 1904 – Budapest, 2009) Great Purifying Storm, 1961 oil on canvas; 300 × 300 cm inv. no. MM.89.23

Martyn, Ferenc (Kaposvár, 1899 – Pécs, 1986) Composition, ca. 1948 oil on canvas; 91 × 110 cm inv. no. FK10265 Ország, Lili (Uzhhorod [today Ukraine], 1926 – Budapest, 1978) Parabolic Antenna, 1955 collage on paper; 173 × 115 mm inv. no. MM.86.294 Ország, Lili (Uzhhorod [today Ukraine], 1926 – Budapest, 1978) Watchful Eyes, 1956, 1956 collage on paper; 145 × 57 mm inv. no. MM.86.313 Ország, Lili (Uzhhorod [today Ukraine], 1926 – Budapest, 1978) Little Girl with Figure, 1957, collage on paper; 285 × 170 mm inv. no. MM.86.310 Ország, Lili (Uzhhorod [today Ukraine], 1926 – Budapest, 1978) Writing on the Wall, 1967 oil on fibreboard; 63 × 80 cm inv. no. MM.83.288 Ország, Lili (Uzhhorod [today Ukraine], 1926 – Budapest, 1978) Roman Heads, 1975 oil on fibreboard; 67 × 87 cm inv. no. MM.84.266 Schéner, Mihály (Medgyesegyháza, 1923 – Budapest, 2003) Scribble, 1968 oil on fibreboard; 82 × 130 cm inv. no. MM.91.12 Tóth, Menyhért (Mórahalom, 1904 – Budapest, 1980) Couple, 1962 oil on canvas; 84 × 64 cm inv. no. MM.81.178 Tóth, Menyhért (Mórahalom, 1904 – Budapest, 1980) Protection, 1972 oil on canvas; 67 × 87 cm inv. no. MM.81.157 Vajda, Júlia (Trenčín [today Slovakia], 1913 – Budakeszi, 1982) Composition, 1947 oil on canvas; 55 × 47 cm inv. no. FK8701 Vaszkó, Erzsébet (Kikinda [today Serbia], 1902 – Budapest, 1986) Mountains, 1964 pastel on paper; 78 × 98 inv. no. MM.89.121

Vaszkó, Erzsébet (Kikinda [today Serbia], 1902 – Budapest, 1986) Fear, 1970 pastel on paper; 78 × 98 cm inv. no. MM.89.88 Socialist Realism and Afterwards Stalin Monument Competition (photo documentation), 1949 gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard; each ca. 25 × 32 cm Participating artists: György Baksa Soós (inv. no.

1839), Lajos Bartha (inv. no. 1847), András Beck (inv. no. 1939), Dezső Bokros Birman (inv. no.

285), Géza Csorba (inv. no. 1832), Béni Ferenczy (inv. no. 2019), Károly Hampl (inv. no. 1851), Jenő Kerényi (inv. no. 1912), Ferenc Medgyessy (inv. no. 2048), Sándor Mikus (inv. no. 1860), István Szabó (inv. no. 1963), Márk Vedres (inv. no. 1927), Tibor Vilt (inv. no. 1517) Barcsay, Jenő (Cătina [today Romania], 1900 – Budapest, 1988) Picture Architecture in Brown, 1970 oil on canvas; 84 × 104 cm inv. no. MM.82.171 Bartha, László (Cluj [today Cluj-Napoca, Romania], 1902 – Kőszeg, 1998) Calcination Plant, 1959 tempera on cardboard; 72 × 90 cm inv. no. 62.73T Bencze, László (Székesfehérvár, 1907 – Budapest, 1992) Together, 1970 tempera, oil and valkyd paint on wood; 38 × 58 cm inv. no. 74.26T Bencze, László (Székesfehérvár, 1907 – Budapest, 1992) Mountain with Village, 1971 tempera on fibreboard; 38 × 58 cm inv. no. 74.28T Bernáth, Aurél (Marcali, 1895 – Budapest, 1982) Atelier, 1949 pastel on cardboard; 80 × 108.5 cm inv. no. 50.448 Bernáth, Aurél (Marcali, 1895 – Budapest, 1982) Report of the Councillor, 1950 tempera on wood; 37.5 × 67.5 cm inv. no. FK10.378 Czimra, Gyula (Budapest, 1901 – Budapest, 1966) The Artist’s Room, 1957 oil on canvas; 47 ×33 cm inv. no. 74.51T Czimra, Gyula (Budapest, 1901 – Budapest, 1966) Still Life with Candle, 1959 oil on cardboard mounted on wood; 55 × 29 cm inv. no. 73.87T

Czimra, Gyula (Budapest, 1901 – Budapest, 1966) Interior with a Vase, 1961 oil on fibreboard; 55 × 29 cm inv. no. 73.87T Czimra, Gyula (Budapest, 1901 – Budapest, 1966) Still Life in the Kitchen, 1962 oil on fibreboard; 41 × 35 cm inv. no. 74.63T Csernus, Tibor (Kondoros, 1927 – Paris, 2007) People from Újpest (Újpest Wharf), 1957 oil on canvas; 140 × 150 cm inv. no. 58.31.T. Félegyházi, László (Satu Mare [today Romania], 1907 – Debrecen, 1986) Stakhanovite of a Furniture Factory, 1949 oil on wood; 131 × 98 cm inv. no. FK10079 Gruber, Béla (Budapest, 1936 – Budapest, 1963) Painter in the Studio, 1962 oil on canvas; 205 × 307 cm inv. no. 74.18T Gulyás, Gyula (Miskolc, 1944 – Budapest, 2008) Sculpture I, 1968 gilded bronze on painted plaster; 12 × 22 × 12 cm inv. no. MM.93.9.1 Gulyás, Gyula (Miskolc, 1944 – Budapest, 2008) Sculpture II., 1968 gilded bronze; 12 × 22 × 12.5 cm inv. no. MM.93.9.2 Kassák Lajos (Nové Zámky [today Slovakia], 1887 – Budapest, 1967) The Sun Has Risen, 1961 oil on canvas; 108 × 96.5 cm inv. no. 70.125T Kassák, Lajos (Nové Zámky [today Slovakia], 1887 – Budapest, 1967) Monumental, 1966 oil on canvas; 100 × 90 cm inv. no. 70.126.T Kerényi, Jenő (Budapest, 1908 – Budapest, 1975) Genius (Liberation), ca. 1968 bronze; 152 × 44 × 36 cm inv. no. MM.82.83.

Kondor, Béla (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) Peace! Railway Strike. In Memory of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1958 engraving on paper; 242 × 204 mm inv. no. MM.77.279

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Kondor, Béla (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) Happening III, 1969 engraving on paper; 335 × 265 mm inv. no. MM.77.386

Gyémánt, László (Budapest, 1935) Cosmopolis, 1964 oil on canvas; 90 × 120 cm inv. no. MM.89.1

Konkoly, Gyula (Budapest, 1941) Softened Egg, 1968 mixed technique on canvas; 125 × 125 × 50 cm inv. no. MM.91.100

Major, János (Budapest, 1938 – Budapest, 2008) In Memory of Hieronymus Bosch, 1964 steel engraving on paper; 240 × 155 mm inv. no. G70.66

Lakner, László (Budapest, 1936) The Beginnings of the Food Canning Industry, 1961 oil on canvas; 95 × 135 cm inv. no. 73.34T

Keserü, Ilona (Pécs, 1933) Framed, 1968 oil and mixed technique on wood; 100 × 70 cm inv. no. MM.87.170

Major, János (Budapest, 1938 – Budapest, 2008) – Gy. Molnár, István (Kunhegyes, 1933) Partnerships, 1967 engraving on paper; 291 × 397 mm inv. no. G69.118 Miháltz, Pál (Văleni [today Romania], 1899 – Budapest, 1988) Boilersmiths’ Brigade, 1951 oil on canvas; 135 × 103 cm inv. no. FK10297 Molnár, Sándor (Sajólád, 1936) Dragon Slayer, 1966 oil on canvas; 200 × 490 cm inv. no. MM.89.98 Móritz, Sándor (Celldömölk, 1924 – Stockholm, 1966) Fruit Harvest in the Kolkhoz, 1952–1955 oil on canvas; 59 × 49 cm inv. no. FK10366 Somogyi, József (Hirm [today Austria], 1916 – Budapest, 1993) Pick and Shovel Man (János Kovács Szántó), 1965 bronze; 212 × 100 × 52 cm inv. no. MM.82.89 Veszelszky, Béla (Budapest, 1905 – Budapest, 1977) Landscape, 1963 oil on fibreboard; 100 × 80 cm inv. no. MM.91.6 Vilt, Tibor (Budapest, 1905 – Budapest, 1983) Cage, 1949 nails and wire on wood; 29.5 × 45 × 10 cm inv. no. MM.83.283 From Surnaturalism to the Influence of Pop Art Csernus, Tibor (Kondoros, 1927 – Párizs, 2007) Angyalföld, 1958–1959 oil on fibreboard; 95 × 135 cm inv. no. 73.34T Csernus, Tibor (Kondoros, 1927 – Paris, 2007) Modellers, 1963 oil on canvas; 142 × 145 cm inv. no. MM.83.299

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Lakner, László (Budapest, 1936) Polytechnic Instructional Cupboard, 1961 oil on canvas; 99.5 × 131.5 cm inv. no. MM.82.127 Sylvester, Katalin (Mezőtúr, 1929) Still Life, 1960–1964 oil on canvas; 100 × 80 cm inv. no. 66.122.T Szabó Ákos (Budapest, 1936 ) Kitchen, 1961 oil on canvas; 70 × 110 cm inv. no. MM.88.54 Szabó Ákos (Budapest, 1936) Farewell, 1962 watercolour and tempera on fibreboard; 85 × 140 cm inv. no. MM.92.2 Iparterv Altorjai, Sándor (Maklár, 1933 – Szigliget, 1979) May I Sinking Upwards (Waver), 1967 oil, glue and mixed technique on fibreboard; 305 × 342 cm inv. no. MM.82.354 Bak, Imre (Budapest, 1939) Blue Frame, 1968 oil on canvas; 120 × 222 cm inv. no. MM.87.65 Frey, Krisztián (Budapest, 1929 – Zürich, 1997) 3180 (Camisole), 1966 oil and mixed technique on fibreboard; 123 × 84 cm inv. no. MM.97.35 Frey, Krisztián (Budapest, 1929 – Zürich, 1997) Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis (Rákosliget), 1969 oil on wood; 52 × 70 cm inv. no. MM.92.137 Hencze, Tamás (Szekszárd, 1938) Horizontal Structure, 1969 oil on paper; 101 × 71 cm inv. no. MM.90.115

Lakner, László (Budapest, 1936) Bone, 1968 oil on canvas; 125 × 214 cm inv. no. MM.2002.62 Molnár, Sándor (Sajólád, 1936) Principle, 1968 oil, laths, and twine on canvas; 98 × 134 cm inv. no. MM.90.118 Nádler, István (Visegrád, 1938) Composition, 1965–1968 oil on canvas; 100 × 100 cm inv. no. 73.106T Siskov, Ludmil (Sofia [Bulgaria], 1936) The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, 1969 acrylic on canvas; 160 × 150 cm on loan from the artist Siskov, Ludmil (Sofia [Bulgaria], 1936) Astronauts, 1969 acrylic on canvas; 160 × 150 cm inv.no. MM 95.1 Szentjóby, Tamás (St. Auby Tamás) (Fót, 1944) Portable Trench for Three, 1969 gauze, wood and reed; 93 × 180 × 60 cm inv. no. MM.93.43 Avant-garde Directions in the 1970s Altorjay, Gábor (Budapest, 1946) Short Circuit Device, 1968 object; 7 × 46 × 22 cm inv. no. MM.95.41 Attalai, Gábor (Budapest, 1934 – Budapest, 2011) Making a Close Crop 1–4, 1970 mixed technique on paper; each 300 × 420 mm inv. no. MM.90.75–78 Baranyay, András (Budapest, 1938 – Budapest, 2016) Hand 1–2, 1985 paper, coloured photograph; each 405 × 275 mm inv. no. MM.87.106–107

Csiky, Tibor (Olaszliszka, 1932 – Budapest, 1989) Kenzo Tange, 1979 steel; 18 × 18 × 11.5 cm inv. no. MM.83.93

Maurer, Dóra (Budapest, 1937) I Would Become Rather a Bird 1–4, 1971 paper, aquatint, folding; 570 × 990 mm inv. no. MM.78.156

Csutoros, Sándor (Debrecen, 1942 – Budapest, 1989) Red Spheres, 1970–1973, 3 pieces plastic; each 20 × 12.5 × 12.5 inv. no. MM.93.69

Paizs, László (Szentpéterúr, 1935 – Budapest, 2009) The Crown-Prince and His Wife Assassinated, 1970 acrylic; 62 × 35 × 17 cm inv. no. MM.81.300

Erdély, Miklós (Budapest, 1928 – Budapest, 1986) Man Is Not Perfect 1–4, 1976 gelatin silver print, paper, collage; each 497 × 598 mm inv. no. MM.83.203–206

Pinczehelyi, Sándor (Szigetvár, 1946) XYZ, 1973–1977 gelatin silver print on paper; 350 × 250 mm inv. no. MM.99.53

Galántai, György (Bikács, 1941) Confrontation, 1981 gelatin silver print on paper; 295 × 395 mm inv. no. MM.90.82

Tót Endre (Sümeg, 1937) Normal Rain – Tót Rain, 1971 gelatin silver print; 231 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.95.23

Galántai, György (Bikács, 1941) Homage to Vera Muhina II, 1980–1986 gelatin silver print on paper; 395 × 295 mm inv. no. MM.90.81

Tót Endre (Sümeg, 1937) Your Rain – My Rain, 1971 gelatin silver print; 231 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.95.24

Gáyor, Tibor (Budapest, 1929) Paving Stone Action 1–4, 1971 gelatin silver print; each 305 × 405 mm inv. no. MM.2010.36.1–4

Tót Endre (Sümeg, 1937) Corner Rain, 1971 gelatin silver print; 231 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.95.25

Hajas, Tibor (Budapest, 1946 – Szeged, 1980) – Vető, János (Budapest, 1953) Surface Torture I (Senses), 1978 photographic paper mounted on wood; 90 × 110 cm inv. no. MM.90.3

Tót, Endre (Sümeg, 1937) Zero-Rain, 1971 gelatin silver print on paper; 231 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.95.26

Halász, Károly (Paks, 1946 – Paks, 2016) Private Broadcast, Irrational Television 1– 3, 1974–1975 gelatin silver print on paper; each 505 × 595 mm inv. no. MM.90.67–69 Kondor, Béla (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) From the Catastrophe series I–XIX, 1970–1972 gelatin silver print on paper; 295 × 398 mm inv. no. MM.83.55 Kondor, Béla (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) From the Catastrophe series I–XIX, 1970–1972 gelatin silver print on paper; 295 × 415 mm inv. no. MM.83.66 Maurer, Dóra (Budapest, 1937) V’s May Day Demonstration on Artificial Ground (Private May Day Demonstration on an Artificial Field), 1971 gelatin silver print and paper, mixed technique; 69 × 88 cm inv. no. MM.2001.18

Türk, Péter (Pestszenterzsébet, 1943 – Budapest, 2015) Stepping into a Line, a Steel Wire, a Branch, and then on the Tip of a Knife into the Point, 1976 gelatin silver print mounted on wood; 24 × 120 × 4 cm inv. no. MM.98.52

Haris, László (Budapest, 1943) 5/06/1975 (2), 1975 gelatin silver print on RC paper, vintage; 455 × 600 mm inv. no. MM.2010.78.2 Haris, László (Budapest, 1943) 5/06/1975, 1975 gelatin silver print mounted on fibreboard; 1045 × 1845 mm inv. no. MM.97.66 Kelemen, Károly (Győr, 1948) Jackson Pollock in Action, 1978 graphite on canvas; 120 × 100.5 cm inv. no. MM.93.57 Kocsis, Imre (Makó, 1940 – Szentendre, 2015) Remediation, 1974–1976 oil on fibreboard; 147.5 × 213.5 cm inv. no. MM.81.374 Méhes, László (Budapest, 1944) Lukewarm Water 1, 1970 oil on fibreboard; 65.5 × 86 cm inv. no. MM.92.109 Nyári, István (Budapest, 1952–) Artist Guards, 1977 tempera on paper; 70 × 100 cm inv. no. MM.93.77 Szilvitzky, Margit (Budapest, 1931) Layers 1, 1978 canvas; 20 × 20 × 20 cm inv. no. MM.2010.77 Szilvitzky, Margit (Budapest, 1931) Layers 2, 1978 canvas; 17 × 18 × 20 cm inv. no. MM.2010.79

Conceptual Art and Photorealism

The Art of the 1980s: “New Sensibility” and Underground

Fehér, László (Székesfehérvár, 1953) Subway 2, 1978 oil on fibreboard; 241 × 170 cm inv. no. MM.2004.21

Bernát, András (Törökszentmiklós, 1957) Untitled, 1985 oil on canvas; 110 × 150 cm inv. no. MM.87.17

Gulyás, Kati (Budapest, 1945) Movement – Motionless Movement 2, 1979 gelatin silver print on canvas; 150 × 200 cm inv. no. MM.94.58

Birkás, Ákos (Budapest, 1941) Head 25, 1987 oil on canvas; 206.3 × 126 cm inv. no. MM.95.71

Haris, László (Budapest, 1943) 5/06/1975 (1), 1975 gelatin silver print on RC paper, vintage; 455 × 600 mm inv. no. MM.2010.78.1

Böröcz, András (Budapest, 1956) Adam and Eve as Chimney Sweepers, 1985 India ink and wash on paper; 480 × 630 mm inv. no. MM.86.46

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Bukta, Imre (Mezőszemere, 1952) Free Spraying at Dawn, 1985 wood, metal, paper, plastic, painted installation; 240 × 400 × 80 cm inv. no. MM.91.24 Bullás, József (Zalaegerszeg, 1958) Interior, 1985 oil on canvas; 150 × 200.5 cm inv. no. MM.86.395 ef Zámbó, István (Salgótarján, 1950) Duckling with Pond, 1984 oil on fibreboard; 69.5 × 100 cm inv. no. MM.86.154 fe Lugossy, László (Kecskemét, 1947) Living Water, 1986 mixed technique on wood; 147 × 63 cm inv. no. MM.89.111 Fehér, László (Székesfehérvár, 1953) Looking into the Well, 1988 oil on canvas; 250 × 180 cm inv. no. MM.90.26 Károlyi, Zsigmond (Budapest, 1952) Untitled 4–5, 1986 photo painting on paper; each 112 × 112 cm inv. no. MM.89.8–9 Koncz, András (Budapest, 1953) Twin Sunset, 1985 oil on canvas; 250 × 300 cm inv. no. MM.86.390 Méhes, Lóránt (Szabadszállás, 1951) Pages of a Notebook, 1986 colour pencil, felt-tip pen and India ink on paper; each 240 × 165 mm inv. no. MM.89.84.3–5 Mulasics, László (Szepetnek, 1954 – Feketebács, 2001) Treasures of the Homeland 2, 1988 encaustic on canvas; 120 × 140 cm inv. no. MM.89.69 Nádler, István (Visegrád, 1938) Homage to Malevich, 7 July, 1985 oil on canvas; 202 × 150 cm inv. no. MM.86.43 Révész, László (Budapest, 1957) Version Pardner, 1986–1987 silk screen on paper; 370 × 535 mm inv. no. MM.88.38 Roskó, Gábor (Budapest, 1958) Let’s See What’s the News in the World, 1989 oil and acrylic on fibreboard; 153 × 153 cm inv. no. MM.91.171

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Sugár, János (Budapest, 1958) Nobody Hurts, 1986/2010 IBM PC AT/PC paint, colour print; 210 × 280 mm inv. no. MM.2012.105 Sugár, János (Budapest, 1958) Automobile Greeting, 1986/2010 IBM PC AT/PC paint, colour print; 210 × 280 mm inv. no. MM.2012.106 Sugár, János (Budapest, 1958) Very Sick, 1986/2010 IBM PC AT/PC paint, colour print; 210 × 280 mm inv. no. MM.2012.107 Sugár, János (Budapest, 1958) A Belgrade Thing, 1986/2010 IBM PC AT/PC paint, colour print; 210 × 280 mm inv. no. MM.2012.108 Sugár, János (Budapest, 1958) Diabolic Film, 1986/2010 IBM PC AT/PC paint, colour print; 210 × 280 mm inv. no. MM.2012.109 Szirtes, János (Budapest, 1954) Six Syllables, 1985 oil and gold paint on canvas; 270 × 280 cm inv. no. MM.87.59 Wahorn, András (Budapest, 1953) Woman with a Snake, 1986 India ink and crayon on cardboard; 105 × 84.5 cm inv. no. MM.91.113 After the Fall of Communism Ádám, Zoltán (Budapest, 1959) Untitled – Blue, 1992 lime, pigment, India ink, and chalk on wood; 92 × 61 cm inv. no. MM.92.129.2 Ádám, Zoltán (Budapest, 1959) Untitled – White, 1992 lime and pigment on wood; 92 × 61 cm inv. no. MM.92.129.1 Ádám, Zoltán (Budapest, 1959) Three Fountains, 1992 India ink, and laths on wood; 94.5 × 55 cm inv. no. MM.92.129.3 Birkás, Ákos (Budapest, 1941) OT (3.9P–S) (Untitled), 1999 oil on canvas; 180 × 110 cm inv. no. MM.2002.1

Erdélyi, Gábor (Budapest, 1970) Stream, 1998 oil, lacquer, silk, gabardine, canvas; 238.5 × 137.5 cm inv. no. MM.99.48 Farkas, Gábor (Szombathely, 1965) Unified, 1991 oil on canvas; 150 × 170.5 cm on loan from the artist Galántai, György (Bikács, 1941) Shifts, 1989 steel; 115 × 200 × 28 cm inv. no. MM.90.27 Gémes, Péter (Budapest, 1951 – Budapest, 1996) Consolations 1, 1983 offset on paper; 224 × 202 mm inv. no. MM.98.44 Gémes, Péter (Budapest, 1951 – Budapest, 1996) Consolations 2, 1983 offset on paper; 278 × 215 mm inv. no. MM.98.45 Gémes, Péter (Budapest, 1951 – Budapest, 1996) Consolations 3, 1983 offset on paper; 208 × 285 mm inv. no. MM.98.46 Gémes, Péter (Budapest, 1951 – Budapest, 1996) Consolations 4, 1983 offset on paper; 209 × 214 mm inv. no. MM.98.47 Gerhes Gábor (Budapest, 1962) E and É (1, Elekes), 1997 silver print on paper; 350 × 450 mm inv. no. MM.2009.8 Gerhes Gábor (Budapest, 1962) E and É (4, Eike), 1997 silver print on paper; 350 × 450 mm inv. no. MM.2009.9 Hajdú, Kinga (Budapest, 1964) A Bowl of Cherries, 1998 oil on canvas; 25.5 × 40.5 cm inv. no. MM.2002.59.2 Hajdú, Kinga (Budapest, 1964) Three Cherries, 1998 oil on canvas; 25.5 × 40.5 cm inv. no.MM.2002.59.3 Hajdú, Kinga (Budapest, 1964) Six Cherries, 1998 oil on canvas; 25.5 × 40.5 cm inv. no. MM.2002.59.4

Hajdú, Kinga (Budapest, 1964) The Glass Is Full, 1998 oil on canvas; 25.5 × 40.5 cm inv. no. MM.2002.59.5 Kicsiny, Balázs (Salgótarján, 1958) Teddy, Bob, Jacques, 1991 charcoal, fibreboard and paper; 120 × 204 × 57 each inv. no. MM.99.49 Koronczi, Endre (Budapest, 1968) 193231NF41, 1993 casein paint on canvas; 200 × 100 cm on loan from the artist Köves, Éva (Moscow [today Russia], 1965) Timeless Times, 1991 oil on canvas; 160 × 250 cm inv. no. MM.92.39 Szabó, Dezső (Keszthely, 1967) Spot 7/2: Subway, 1999 C print, matte UV coating, paper, plexiglas; 240 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.2006.22 Szabó, Dezső (Keszthely, 1967) Spot 7/3: Stairs, 1999 C print, matte UV coating, paper, plexiglas; 240 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.2006.23 Szabó, Dezső (Keszthely, 1967) Spot 7/4: Bathroom, 1999 C print, matte UV coating, paper, plexiglas; 240 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.2006.24 Szabó, Dezső (Keszthely, 1967) Spot 7/5: Forest, 1999 C print, matte UV coating, paper, plexiglas; 240 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.2006.25 Szabó, Dezső (Keszthely, 1967) Helyszín 7/6: Room, 1999 C print, matte UV coating, paper, plexiglas; 240 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.2006.26 Szabó, Dezső (Keszthely, 1967) Helyszín 7/7: Corridor, 1999 C print, matte UV coating, paper, plexiglas; 240 × 360 mm inv. no. MM.2006.27 Szentjóby, Tamás (St. Auby Tamás) (Fót, 1944) The Statue of Liberty’s Soul W 1992, 1992 gelatin silver print, scale modell; 600 × 500 mm, 24 × 44 × 10 cm on loan from the artist

Szűcs, Attila (Miskolc, 1967) Red Blindspot, 1999 oil on canvas; 120 × 150 cm inv. no. MM.99.18 Art in the New Millennium – Points of Reference and Memory Albert, Ádám (Veszprém, 1975) Never Take a Trip Alone Goethe’s Study, 2011 wood, print, computer monitor; 55.5 × 69 cm; 79.3 × 109.2 cm Humboldt’s Study, 2011 peep-show box, plexi, mdf, dibond, wood, steel; 196 × 84 × 94 cm on loan from the artist Eperjesi, Ágnes (Budapest, 1964) Still Life, 1998 Polaroid photogram; 54 × 74 cm inv. no. MM.99.19 Esterházy, Marcell (Budapest, 1977) Orthodromie, 2011 gelatin silver print mounted on wood; 100 × 87.5 × 7.5 cm inv. no. MM.2013.14 Fodor, János (Budapest, 1975) Snooze Sheet, 2008 mixed technique on paper; 1595 × 2415 mm inv. no. MM.2010.2 Imre, Mariann (Medgyesegyháza, 1968) Saint Cecilia, 1997–2000 concrete, thread, plexiglas; 5.5 × 208.5 × 60 × 360 cm inv. no. MM.2000.15 Lovas, Ilona (Budapest, 1948) Station No. 49, 2000 glass and steel plate; 100 × 80 cm inv. no. MM.2012.95 Szacsva Y, Pál (Târgu Mureş [today Romania], 1967) Reprojection, XXXIII, 2001 C-print, aluminium plate; 100 × 124 cm inv. no. MM.2009.19.

Szarka, Péter (Kőszeg, 1964) “Oh Tannenbaum”, 2012 lenticular print; 390 × 850 mm inv. no. MM.2013.12 Vincze, Ottó (Kisvárda, 1964) The Bust Measure of a Constellation, 1997–2008 metal sheet, buttons, plexiglas, photograph; 360 × 794 × 9 cm inv. no. MM.2013.15

Constructions, Machines, Structures Jovánovics, György (Budapest, 1939) The Great Prism, One (1.1), 1995 plaster, wood; 214 × 381 × 95 cm inv. no. MM.95.70 Kondor, Béla (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) Large Aeroplane Model, 1961 paper and wood; 84 × 79 × 22 cm inv. no. MM.79.19 Kondor, Béla (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) Occurrence, 1969 oil on canvas; 166 × 240 cm inv. no. MM.77.193 Kondor, Béla (Pestszentlőrinc, 1931 – Budapest, 1972) Drawing 2, 1969 charcoal on canvas; 198 × 250 cm inv. no. MM.77.200 Megyik, János (Szolnok, 1938) Kötcse, 1988–1997 wood; 330 × 420 × 150 cm inv. no. MM.98.53 Reigl, Judit (Kapuvár, 1923) Unfolding, 1975 oil on canvas; 220 × 300 cm inv. no. MM.2014.9 Szalai, Tibor (Tét, 1958 – Budapest, 1998) Composition, 1995 painted, pressed wood; 225 × 207 × 142 cm inv. no. MM.95.88 The Works in the Dome Berczeller, Rudolf Rezső (Trstená [today Slovakia], 1912 – Budapest, 1992) The Angels of the Apocalypse, 1990–1991, 6 pieces metal mesh, steel construction, plastic coating; 160 × 351 × 105 cm each inv. no. MM.92.32 El Kazovsky (Leningrad, USSR [today Saint Petersburg, Russia], 1948 – Budapest, 2008) Installation, 2008 wood; 450 × 450 × 540 cm on loan from the National Theatre, Budapest Szervátiusz, Tibor (Cluj [today Cluj-Napoca, Romania], 1930) Throne of Fire (The Execution of Dózsa), 1968–1972 copper, steel; 358 × 207 × 182 cm on loan from the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest

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