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This site allows you to view 200 entries from the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Hungarian Arts, published between 1999 and 2001. These artists played a major role in the last 50 years of Hungarian fine arts. The editor of this compilation is art historian Péter Fitz, director of the Municipal Picture Gallery (Budapest Fővárosi Képtár). In addition to the articles, you also have the opportunity to see some pictures taken from the artists' oeuvre. If you are searching for a hungarian artist, please click on the link found on the top of this page. Thank you for visiting us! Pease send your comments to the following email address: info@artportal.hu
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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE – July 27, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: Classic Paris Abstraction –Judit Reigl in Debrecen

About Judit Reigl’s presence on the contemporary art scene, suffice it to say that her works are permanently on show in two of the most important contemporary art museums: MoMA in New York City, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Eager to match her fame, MODEM in Debrecen has lent its entire first floor exhibition space to her works. What we see is black explosions of paint upon huge, yellowish canvasses, undulating strips of many colours, and also hardly visible, enormous human figures floating in mid-air. Spontaneity, existentialism, and non-figurative execution.
Nearing 90, Judit Reigl is a characteristic exponent of post-war French abstract art. She worked in a context in which Yves Klein enchanted the public with his female nudes painted blue and sent rolling about on his canvasses, or where Oriental calligraphies mixing scriptural and pictorial qualities gave inspiration to many painters. Of course, not all painters welcomed such sources of inspiration. Rigorous archdeacon of Surrealism André Breton, to name only one, loathed abstraction and banned his painter friends from applying “automatic writing”, a procedure liberating so many poets of the time. 
Breton had a predilection for Reigl. Soon after he had got to know her, which was in 1954, he offered to exhibit her in the Surrealists’ gallery. Being preoccupied with “automatic writing”, i.e. spontaneous, uncontrolled painting, the young Hungarian expatriate hesitated for a while to accept the offer. But even when she agreed to the idea, she obstinately exhibited some of her recent abstract compositions along with the dream-collages giving rise to fantastic Surrealist associations.
The Debrecen exhibition offers a few of her early Surrealist paintings with their characteristic smacked and slushed surfaces but soon we come to the Big Bang. Reigl had apparently rolled up her sleeves to reach for handfuls of paint which she hurled at her canvasses and then she smeared the heaps of paint with circular movements and with a flat object, usually with a curtain-rod, a procedure that revealed the red and yellow lumps of paint buried under the black ones.
Letting her instincts loose, heeding only her internal rhythms, she worked before her canvasses with full force. In no time, human figures, too, emerged from her abstractions. Not even the disappointment of the public accustomed to abstraction could make her abstain from depicting vague human figures.
Anchored in the art of the fifties, her painting can alternately be attached to lyrical abstraction as well as Tachisme, Informel, gesture, or calligraphy painting. Those labels, however, describe the formal gown of her art only. Her painter’s oeuvre is about reduction. What she has done, she has reduced the world to such basic metaphors as the fall of existentialist Man, a Big Bang encompassing the entire Universe, and the Rhythm of circular, eternal returns. Rather than being the offspring of conscious premeditation, those metaphors about the meaning of living arise from an artist’s deepest instincts let loose.
MODEM, Debrecen
17 June – 19 September

PREVIEWS:

Hajnal Németh: Two Songs with One Ending
24 July – 3 October
MODEM – Modern and Contemporary Arts Centre
Born in Szőny in 1972, Hajnal Németh has participated in a host of one-man and group shows in Europe, America, and Asia. She generally uses visual codes taken from popular culture or political propaganda, codes that she then translates into new semantic contexts. In the ground-floor reception area of the museum one can see a completely crushed BMW accompanied by a sound installation (or voice-over) of the statements of those who have survived the crash, or rather the transcriptions of those statements into operatic arias performed by three opera singers.

Open Collections – A Platform for Collectors’ Swaps
22 July – 8 August
LudwigInsert (formerly Józsefváros Gallery) – Budapest
Organised by the Friends of the Ludwig Museum, the show puts many privately owned works of art on view that would otherwise be invisible for the public. Over and above this, both visitors and exhibitors are offered the chance to swap some of their possessions, a unique and unprecedented chance never before offered in the history of Hungarian art collecting.

Canvasses – A Show by Lőrinc Borsos, Roland Horváth, András Király, Lehel Kovács, Attila Szabó, Dorottya Szabó
21 July – 4 September
Viltin Gallery
All six exhibiting artists have witnessed the utter failure of predictions forecasting the “death of painting”, and have subsequently identified with the more recent prediction forecasting the immortality of painting as an art. Roland Horváth mixes new Naturalism with visionary Symbolism. The couple by the name of Lőrinc Borsos present works soaked in refined political irony. András Király presents thinly painted iconic scenes from Hungarian culture. With Dorottya Szabó, icons and symbols are taken from the collective mind of her social world for some personal and lyrical re-working, and then are channelled back outspokenly to where they have come from. Lehel Kovács and Attila Szabó both believe in the unremitting force of a spectacle captured with sensitive but firm brushstrokes. 

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE – July 20, 2010

REVIEW:

Erika Baglyas: Pancrator Pantocrator, or Panofsky in a Cloak

Zsófia Farkas and Borbála Szalai have aimed at no less than putting a contemporary cloak on iconography, a term coined and a procedure created by art historian Erwin Panofsky, and exhibiting it in Holdudvar Gallery on Margaret Island. The science of pictorial content portends to define and analyse what works of art convey, which includes solutions of the symbolic visual language inherent in classic works of art.
Panofsky’s analytical method has been transferred to modern leisure activities. The Borsos-Lőrinc couple, a certain H. Power, László Karácsonyi and Péter Vályi have contributed works replete with biblical and art history references, supplemented by mock notes from dusty museum ledgers and equally dusty encyclopaedias on shelves nearby, all aimed at giving the visitor some help in interpreting for his/her contemporary discourse terms like grace, halo, and contraposition.
The irony of it all is that this show makes shambles of the visitor’s efforts at interpretation. Iconography is not at all suitable for interpreting contemporary jabs at art. Nascent art cries out for a new terminology. This is what the curators convey to future students of today’s art.
The exhibiting artists, never a long way away from Christianity as a subject matter, take a great deal of pleasure in representing Christian themes in a contemporary manner. Lilla Lőrinc has painted the papal automobile against a golden background. Together with her husband, she has painted the Pope’s vestment without the Pope, and also the loin-cloth of Christ without Christ himself. H. Power has painted the coming of the Holy Spirit and the story of David and Goliath with a felt-pen and pencil in a comic copybook, while submitting two small but masterly icon-paintings, too.
The entire exhibition produces a pleasurable summer cocktail of expression. Far from surprising in this mélange is the modern combat-soldier in full gear kneeling before a sacrificial lamb (Borsos), or the computer cursor-arrow standing in for Christ’s hand (László Karácsonyi), or the metal spoon flanked by two China figurines of the Virgin Mary (Péter Vályi).
In the corner of the exhibition space rounded off as an apse, we find a horrific scene of the Apocalypse with its blood-soaked Barbie dolls and Nintendo soldiers (Karácsonyi). The works fitted with seemingly accurate horizons of interpretation make shambles of our belief in the use of any terminology. Even the shelf of the gallery comes down under the terrific weight (over 12 lib.) of a huge encyclopaedia.
Holdudvar Gallery
8 July – 26 July

PREVIEWS:

ordash – A Show by the Group Randomroutines
16 July – 4 September
Studió Gallery – Young Artists’ Studio
The group of young artists who call themselves Randomroutines experiment with various narrative forms anchored in several media. The show named “ordash” (“fierce”) presents works applying steel rods used in nettings for reinforced concrete. The “drawings in steel” on view hark back to the artists’ childhood years when those rods were routinely used for official murals radiating optimism on huge walls. On a more private plane, rods were used to make flower stands, window-grates, and fence decorations. These were examples of function-shift so typical of an economy based on shortages. As well as the artists’ large “drawings in steel”, the related sketches and side-products are also on view.

Stereoid - Masked – A Show by Tamás Dobos and Zsolt Gyarmati
15 July – 4 September
G13 Art Gallery
An artist and a photographer have joined forces for this show. Zsolt Gyarmati presents the latest array of his many-layered demon-icons; his pseudo- or anti-beings dubbed “stereoids” impersonate aggressiveness and violence so prevalent today. As to photographer Tamás Dobos, after earning much international praise as cameraman and fashion-photographer, he now submits an intimate confession about his experiences of the world and the “masked” people inhabiting it.

Péter Appelshoffer: Il y a un an / It’s been a year...
14 July – 28 July
Spiritusz Gallery
Péter Appelshoffer’s latest paintings have been inspired by his sojourn in Paris exactly one year ago. Some of the paintings do bear the famous “French” lightness and elasticity in fiery colours, but they, too, end up in the powerful expressiveness for which Hungarian painting is known. The evocative power of the paintings is in fact so great that one is invited to actually touch the rich facture of the surfaces.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
July 13, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: Siófok’s Bilbao Dreams

Can a miracle be repeated? A stagnating Basque foundry town, Bilbao was put on the world’s cultural and tourist map by a single museum building at the turn of the millennium. Many a mayor’s imagination has since run away with the example of a town re-enlivened by millions of visitors. At Lake Balaton, Siófok is also bracing to capture the Bilbao-effect.
Local entrepreneur László Juhász, the engine behind the scheme, had picked on the local baking factory six years ago. A few hundred yards from the motorway, surrounded by orchards and week-end cottages, the brick edifice housing the factory has since come to a standstill. What with its sturdy turret and dog teethed limestone girdle, the building was erected in the “socialist realist” style of the 1950s. Its unplastered brick walls look a little Scandinavian, but it is above all a utilitarian building.
The main factory floor, cleaned and suited to summer exhibitions, still has its huge ventilation pipes and switchboards, romantic requisites of its past.
All this will have to go. The cultural centre presently called 320º (this being the baking heat of bread in centigrade) is envisioning a growth and transfiguration of the Bilbao type.
Due to the efforts of art director Gábor Sz. Szilágyi, no lesser person than Frank O. Gehry exhibited his designs here during the summer of 2008. If all goes to schedule, a unique institution by Hungarian and even regional standards will arise here showing the most topical items of the world’s visual culture as well as housing a technological centre and an education facility.
Trying to broaden the list of attractions the town can offer, Siófok’s local government, with its meagre assets of HUF 2,5 billion, is all behind the scheme. So is the Hungarian government which guarantees the financing of at least the first stage of the construction works. When all is done, Hungary might acquire not only a miraculous new modern edifice, but possibly also something that can serve as the new emblem of the country.
A landmark edifice that, rather like Bilbao’s new Guggenheim Museum, could attract millions of art-loving visitors from around the world.

PREVIEWS:

Polonia and Other Fables - Allan Sekula’s Exhibition
8 July – 19 September
Ludwig Museum Budapest – Museum of Contemporary Art
Allan Sekula (Erie, Pennsylvania, 1951) is one of the most outstanding contemporary documentarians. His series of photographs, films and - last, but not least - photo-historical and theoretical studies are directed toward the continuous, critical renewal and reinterpretation of the documentary genre, and at mapping out the deeper mechanisms of social processes. It is politics, history, social relations, ecology and the phenomena of climate change that emerge from his works, or as he himself says, the imaginary and real morphology of developed capitalism.
For more in English: http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=730&menuId...

The Music Boutique - Ian Anüll, Marc Bijl, Laura Bruce, Ingo Gerken, Matthias Meyer, Hajnal Németh, Thomas Chapman, Nik Nowak
8 July – 31 July
Gallery Neon
Making and publishing photographs, designing covers, organising concerts, or making music themselves, the exhibiting artists are all directly involved with various fields of music production; to be seen or heard (and bought) at the show will be all kinds of music products, limited editions of music related art and posters, and even a sculpture made up of speakers. The sounds recorded are not just musical in nature; they are also sounds of everyday life e.g. a homeless person pulling a bundle of cardboard sheets on a concrete surface, the sound of Coke pouring out on the street, breaths held back etc. The ultimate joke is complete silence recorded on an empty CD – an ironic note on packaging and overproduction where we buy advertisements instead of capturing content.
Pictures: http://galerianeon.blogspot.com/2010/07/zenebolt-music-store.html

Tamás Kovács Budha: "Yes" tags please!
6 July – 20 July
Ötkert Gallery
"No tags please", so the note runs at music clubs banishing signs left by visitors. Prohibition tends to encourage and challenge some people to do precisely what is prohibited. I have processed the related effects and consequences onto my paper works, the artist says, rather like a group of students decorate the walls of a music club right after they have passed their exams. The life of media artist Tamás Kovács Budha turns around art a hundred percent of the time. Organising art shows, doing concept art, making photographs, spraying city walls, editing books and magazines, he insists, however, on painting, something he has done since he was a small boy. And he is certain that he is going to abide by painting until very late in life.

Charles Fréger: Hereros & Short Haka School
6 July – 3 August
Lumen Gallery
Charles Fréger (1975) presents two of his many portfolios in Lumen Gallery. Short Haka School was made in 2009 in New Zealand capturing students of a Manawatu school wearing both their English-style uniform and their traditional Maori tattoos while posing to the camera in Maori battle-dance postures. The other portfolio named Namibian Herero preswents members of the Herero tribe wearing strange mixtures of colonial army uniforms.
For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_people.

Ghost Faces – A Show by András Szirtes
6 July – 6 August
Tűzraktér Gallery
Szirtes has printed female portraits upon huge sheets of film, portraits previously manipulated, solarised, painted, faded and browned – processes aimed at getting at the ghost faces of the women portrayed. The finished products tend to blend the angelic with the satanic, the masculine with the feminine, and the elderly with the young. It is bordering on the irrational how Szirtes manages to reveal the multiplicity of people’s personalities.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
July 6, 2010

REVIEW:

Erika Baglyas: The Thread as Common Denominator

Laura Somogyi had chosen an activity requiring quite a bit of patience when back in 2000 she had started to spin, twirl, and glue threads into light spatial objects. Nor does painter Dorottya Szabó refrain from taking her time: she sews, punches, and paints layers in a lengthy process. Both had graduated from the class of Árpád Szabados at the Art Academy and although their careers have diverged since, they have their common denominator, i.e. the good old thread.
Although they present a joint exhibition in the Showroom of Budapest Gallery, it is the light canvasses of Dorottya Szabó that prevail over the dark installation by Laura Somogyi. Both artists had started to rely on threads roughly simultaneously, but their objectives were different.
Szabó embroiders her canvasses in order to renew her painter’s technique by letting paint drip through the punch holes left by her needle and creating a blurred effect. Working on both sides, she must have gotten extremely close to her canvasses. Her paintings are almost always symmetrical; her frequently used simple objects e.g. hats, stockings, benches, chandeliers, human heads and limbs etc. create an almost floating effect with their blurred contour lines.
Laura Somogyi’s works tend to create an opposite effect. While Szabó finishes with just two dimensions, Somogyi starts out from an abstract space by putting her lines, deprived from their usual characteristics, into a space of three dimensions. Her floating objects made of threads tend to follow the contours of figures and their limbs, and since they cast shadows, the spectacle thus redoubles and devises a space specifically belonging to her objects.
The two approaches do have a common denominator, though. Not a thread separates them as this exhibition proves but we are helped on to this recognition by Somogyi’s one-room installation much rather than by two storeys full of Szabó’s pictures.
Showroom of Budapest Gallery in Lajos Street
24 June – 25 July

PREVIEWS:

A Panorama Opened by Murals
3 July – 5 September
MODEM – Modern and Contemporary Arts Centre
Large murals by 24 Hungarian artists and craftsmen are to be seen here. Some of the works shown test the borderline between classical and contemporary painting, e.g. the nine-piece series of prints presented by László 2 Hegedűs conveys a story arising from modern urban mythology, while, on the other hand, Eszter Csurka presents her experience of the female body on three classically shaped and painted canvasses. For his part, Gyula Várnai re-interprets a natural phenomenon with a technique based on holography. Some works are predominantly ornamental, while many others tend to dwell right on the borderline between painting and craftsmanship. 

Atmosphere – a Show by Dezső Szabó
2 July – 26 September
Castle Gallery – Veszprém / Dubniczay Palace
Dezső Szabó graduated from the painters’ class of the Art Academy in 1995. Ever since, he has been intrigued by applying photography to painting and has put out a number of series applying simulation techniques of e.g. climate phenomena. He focuses on creating and re-creating realities by crossing over from one layer of reality to another. By blowing up his photos heavily, he arrives at extremely low resolutions that tend to make his pictures granular, creating an overall pseudo-painterly effect.

Rimer Cardillo: Cupí
1 July – 5 September
Municipal Gallery – Kiscelli Museum
Decorated with a Guggenheim and a Pollock Prize, Rimer Cardillo (1944-) presents an installation of three ritual burial heaps observed in the border area of Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. By enacting heathen rituals, Cardillo turns South-American colonial history backwards, and he not only recreates a minute continent in the sacrificial space of one-time Kiscelli Abbey, but he also envisions the ties between the dead and the living by referring to a number of ancient cultures including e.g. Scandinavian or Cumanian burial rites.

Photographs Rarely Seen – A Selection from the Storeroom of the Hungarian Museum of Photography
1 July  - 12 September
House of Hungarian Photography (House of Manó Mai)
Launched 20 years ago, the Hungarian Museum of Photography has increased its collection tenfold. The treasures kept in its storeroom can only be presented to the public through temporary exhibitions such as this one offering highly remarkable, but rarely seen photographs by e. g.  André Kertész, Angelo, Ata Kando, Rudolf Balogh, Imre Benkő, Károly Escher, Lucien Hervé, Antal Jokesz, György Kepes, György Klösz, or József Pécsi.
For much more in English plus images: http://www.maimano.hu/andrekerteszterem/20100701_ritkanlatott/index_en.h...

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
June 29, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: From Villager Cubist to Designer of Chairs – Depero in the Buda Castle

Geometric shapes piling up, human limbs resembling stove-pipes, chessboard patterns, skyscrapers, automobiles and old villagers – Fortunato Depero has invaded the Hungarian National Gallery in a big way. The only Italian avant-garde movement, i.e. Futurism, celebrated its 100th anniversary last year since it was in 1909 that Marinetti published his belligerent manifesto in the Parisian Figaro newspaper. Somewhat capriciously, the series of Italian exhibitions marking the anniversary hurled Depero rather than any other Futurist into the Buda Castle together with his drawings, designs, children’s toys and paintings.
Far from the frontline of the movement, Depero worked diligently and persistently in its second line. He arrived on the scene only in 1915, but his early drawings and designs on view at the exhibition (Cubist heads, dynamic abstract ink-sketches, designs of odd machinery etc.) were marked by a new art form set to uproot every preceding movement.
As it was only to be expected, the dizzying avant-garde dreams were soon followed by some clear-headed thinking, in Depero’s case: rational craftsmanship and cultural synthesis. Although he got involved with modern Russian ballet and the avant-garde theatre, he also discovered that he remained a child wide open to fairy-tales and magic. He created a strange sort of painting that mixed urban, Parisian Cubism with messages coming from village life. His themes are Cubist cows, Cubist wood-cutters, Cubist peasants grazing Cubist cattle, or drinking in Cubist inns.  
This is how he started his manifesto issued in partnership with Balla: „We are striving for a complete fusion in order to completely re-build the Universe, and also to make our day-to-day existence happier.” If you read this manifesto, it contains not just the Modernist high ambition to transform the entire world complete with Tatlin’s revolving spire, or Yona Friedman’s floating city, i.e. the eventually faltering Utopianism of the Avant-garde. Looked at from a closer range, this manifesto also speaks about the merry refurbishment of the world surrounding us. Such “merry re-creation” has also underlain the Italian post-WWII design movement, as opposed to North-European functionalism.
No wonder the Memphis designers of the 1980s drew heavily on Depero’s fantastic fairy-tale furniture. The Futurist Artists’ House founded in 1919 produced small-series furniture by the hundreds. Only one red stool designed by Depero is on view at the exhibition. A little later,  Depero tried his luck as a graphic artist in New York City. His paintings were soon infested with skyscrapers, automobiles, traffic-lights, black people and subways exploding the underlying scenes. Depero soon returned to his native Italy to participate in major state building projects.
Due to the show’s Hungarian curatorial contribution, Depero’s works are supplemented by some Hungarian responses to the more decorative branch of the Futurist movement, i.e. works by Hugó Scheiber who even exhibited jointly with the Futurists in Rome in 1933.
Hungarian National Gallery
4 June – 22 August

PREVIEWS:

Supernatural – Tibor iski Kocsis’ Show
25 June – 31 July
Public Foundation for Modern Art, Contemporary Art Institute – Dunaújváros
Tibor iski Kocsis graduated in 2001 at the Painters’ Department of the Hungarian Art Academy, and is represented by Erika Deák’s Gallery on the art market. He now exhibits paintings, drawings, sculptures and videos that can be interpreted as self-dependent works, but also as units of a grand installation. Whether he draws, or casts a sculpture, he is guided by the principle of life-like similarity, a principle as old as art. His virtuoso technique is made highly interesting on account of the „whys and wherefores” of his choice of objects, in 2010, for life-like representation.

The Corporation 10
24 June – 30 July
acb Contemporary Arts Gallery
After a lengthy pause, The Corporation group of artists presents a new show of their installation responding to the terms „togetherness” and „community”. The installation becomes meaningful precisely by the viewers literally treading upon it. While Gábor Szenteleki presents an enigmatic spiritual oil painting entitled „Shepherd”, a work dealing with topical social tensions and interdependences, János Borsos’ self-revealing work applies manipulated security cameras and monitors. Erik Mátrai exhibits a light-installation named „Gloria Cone” while „.page”, the last of the four, presents a video self-portrait named „Consciousness” using digital sequences and hand-drawn calligraphy to grasp and project a deeply personal quality.

Long-term Action – A Show by Gabriella Csoszó and Katarina Šević
24 June – 30 July
kArton Gallery and Museum
There are several motifs connecting the two artists but most of all, they are both focussing upon movement. While Gabriella Csoszó concentrates upon the walking, often a solitary activity, Katarina Šević is more interested in the movement of human crowds. Along with videos and photographs of the project, the Gallery also presents archival material related to the present show.

Jó / Good – A Show by Adrián Kupcsik
24 June – 29 August
Kiscelli Museum – Oratory
Adrián Kupcsik’s paintings are best interpreted by the notions of Realism, but with a difference. He rejects some of the traditional rules, and tries to uncover some alternative possibilities. To name just one example, his objects do not follow the rules of a central perspective, yet his works convey an intense experience of space. The clue to this is his applying the logic of diagrams rather than the clichés of constructing a spatial effect. His diagrams recount ordinary stories by representing as protagonists the most ordinary objects like culinary utensils. 

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
June 22, 2010

REVIEW:

Erika Baglyas: Nursery Rhymes – Anikó Lóránt

All Anikó Lóránt wishes to achieve with her installations, paintings and drawings is to put some smiles on our faces. I for one have become somewhat saddened even though the stuff on view is very likeable. Recently, many young artists have questioned the notions of originality and mandatory novelty: works made of recycled materials have multiplied in number (see e.g. the pieces of furniture prepared by Anikó Lóránt and Tamás Kaszás), the size of paintings is certainly on the decrease (see e.g. the minute watercolours of Judit Fischer or Beatrix Szörényi), and there has been a growing tendency to carry Fluxus messages forward (see the “Multiplika” works by the group Plagiarism 2000). To say the least, the plasterwork of the wall separating naïve art from grand art, a wall once believed to be firm as a rock, is now coming crumbling down.
Lóránt’s working procedures tend to go against the grain of her colleagues’ expectations. She refuses to use highly priced materials; she uses the DIY method with the intense concentration of a person left to her own resources.
Rather than pursuing grand objectives, she becomes immersed in a meditation technique important primarily for herself. Her materials, too, belong to an ordinary kitchen rather than an artist’s loft. She has prepared a domestic altar out of dozens of randomly found, likeable gizmos laid out on a “floating” bulk of salt plasticine. One of her signature objects is a human figurine with a rabbit’s head recurring also in her colouring books and IKEA-framed pictures. On her smallish watercolours, too, the lonely figures of a world on the periphery of existence act as if they came from a private universe. Enigmatic inscriptions, too, are added for greater effect, e.g. “Where a circle turns around, one can only laugh.” A touch of Nature, another touch of vision, and a touch of the concentrated power of thought.
While copying her own previously made pictures, she is engaged in a recycling process which creates a sense of the sacred of sorts. This is the sacrality of privacy comprising a hugely personal relationship to things and experiences. This kind of sensibility, however, is at the mercy of a professional medium utterly lacking the attentiveness it would require. This is what has saddened me instead of putting smiles on my face. 
Studio Gallery – Young Artists’ Studio
15 June – 10 July

PREVIEWS:

Over the Counter – Phenomena of Post-Socialist Economy in Contemporary Art
17 June – 19 September
Műcsarnok
The exhibition called Over the Counter has been inspired by the economic illusions, utopias, creativity and frustrations that Central Europe has seen recently, and is made relevant by the global economic crisis which began in 2008, and which can be looked upon as a negative critique of the process of adopting the capitalist order. The title of the exhibition refers to different work processes going on in the service sector, and beyond this, to the position of artists in the production process. Whether we take the „effectively” evade certain rules, or we cross various economic processes, we find the product set firmly on the counter, and this is the very thing to which we can relate.
The exhibition features artists, phenomena, problems from all over the region, from the Czech Republic to Armenia, from Lithuania to the former Yugoslavia, artists who redraw the political map of Eastern Europe: these are not the eastern outposts of the European Union, but a territory where survival and prosperity do not follow the western models, but was predestined to go on a different way.
For much more in English plus images: http://www.mucsarnok.hu/new_site/index.php?lang=en&t=539&curmenu=102

The Rhythm of Existence – Judit Reigl’s Oeuvre
17 June – 19 September
MODEM – Modern and Contemporary Art Centre, Debrecen
Living in France since 1950, Judit Reigl enjoys quite some international recognition. Tate Modern, the Pompidou Centre, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum are all proud holders of her paintings, the latter presenting her painting Explosion in the same room as a painting by Jackson Pollock.

Best of Diploma – A Show Presenting Works by Art Academy Students
19 June – 21 July
Barcsay Room of the Art Academy
The works presented at this show– traditionally held at the end of each academic year – were prepared for the students’s final exams in painting, sculpture, graphic art, design, and intermedia. They have been evaluated by a jury comprising faculty and external experts. The publicity around show holds out the promise of professional success for some of the best would-be artists.
For images: http://www.mke.hu/new/diploma2010.php

A Retrospective of Pál Gerber
16 June – 15 August
Ludwig Museum Budapest – Contemporary Arts Museum
The retrospective exhibition of Pál Gerber presents twenty-five years’ work of an artist bringing everyday objects and phenomena into contact with one another in an ironic, reflective or enigmatic approach expressing tactful and humorous social criticism. Pál Gerber`s career began in the late eighties, during the last period of the so called goulash communism. His childhood years in Tatabánya and the industrial milieu of the city had left a strong mark on Gerber, who later moved to Budapest. His works bring back the well-known, rather repulsive slogans, object culture, colour schemes, ever familiar greyness, thought associations and object ensembles of the Kádár era.
Deriving from the material of the legendary Kék Acél (Blue Steel) exhibition held in the year of the regime-change (1989), Ludwig Museum’s show draws an imaginary arc tracing Gerber's 25-year-long journey as an artist. This is a varied oeuvre in terms of genres as well. Instead of addressing this diversity through the obvious chronological approach, however, the exhibition uses juxtaposition in its interpretation of the material. Thus it seeks to establish a dialogue both with Gerber`s oeuvre and between the individual works as well. Although the audience may have seen Gerber's work at a number of exhibitions over the years, such a multifaceted dialogue has not been realised before.
For much more in English plus images: http://lumu.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=729&menuId=43

Sleepwalkers in India – Paintings by Erzsébet Sass Brunner and Erzsébet Brunner
19 June – 22 August
Museum of Applied Art
In pursuit of a dream, two fragile Hungarian women, a mother and her daughter, had started out on foot to India in 1929. All they had was some money and an immense sense of vocation. Through a series of happy coincidences, they did manage to reach India, the land that was to offer them so much to paint. Their painting is marked by their devotion to spirituality and the Hindu religion.
They painted portraits of no smaller personalities than Mahatma Gandhi, Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore, several members of the Nehru family, and the Dalai Lama. Their style is marked by the Post-Impressionist vision of the Nagybánya School mixed with some decorative elements coming from Art Nouveau.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
June 15, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: A Star Is Born – György Kovásznai

A new star has been born. The little-known, high-powered, colourfully scented oil paintings of György Kovásznai have now entered the National Gallery, signalling that post-modernism is now the stuff that museum exhibitions are made of.  Installed with a great deal of stage-technique professionalism, the exhibition manages to retrieve Kovásznai’s oeuvre from oblivion in the manner of an historical recovery effort. Educated to become a painter, working as a cartoonist, and endowed with sizable but borderline creativity and output, up till now Kovásznai has been absent from Hungary’s 20th century art history. Had it not been for a foundation’s money and effort, his oeuvre may well have gone lost for all practical purposes. Instead, a catalogue raisonné equipped with several DVDs, and a superb giant exhibition has arisen.
His character is difficult to reconstruct. He was on good terms with the survivors of Hungary’s post-war European School of painters, he delved with full swing into the allegedly cosmopolitan, neon-lit Budapest of the 60s, but he just did not fit into the usual neo-avant-garde pigeon-hole. True, while still at the Art Academy, he abhorred the late manifestations of grey, flatly mimetic Socialist Realism. His portraits of miners, for example, bring no powerful super-heroes into focus. Instead, his miners are caricature figures fighting with falling beams and unwieldy pikes.
Then came the 60s with their polythene armchairs, a time when Kovásznai found himself by first revelling colourfully and surreally in rich coats of oil-paint: a tendency he came to enrich later. Due to his expressive energies, his historical sensitivity and narrativity, one is forced to think of the more or less contemporary German “heftige Malerei” while realising that he was also a forerunner to the Hungarian “new sensibility” painting of the 80s. Cutting him off from the former was the Iron Curtain, from the latter, his untimely death in 1983. Serving for him as a primordial model was surely Picasso with his quickly drawn, rubber-limbed figures, immense female bosoms, eternal masculine and feminine role-playing, paraphrases of art history, and ceaseless expressivity.
Kovásznai was simultaneously engulfed by the Budapest world of nightclubs, rock music, films, drinks, pretty women, and chain-smoking intellectuals. His animated cartoons starting out from his own oil paintings  enumerate all the relevant figures and characters in almost documentary detail. Although enchanted by this world, he could still remain an outsider. In cafés, for examples, he spotted not only crazy rhythms and elements of pop art, but also hangovers of the old urban tradition of the city. This is why he could consistently remain an outsider, and this is the key to his post-modernity as represented e.g. by his short film of the French Revolution which, rather than submerging in historical pathos, enumerates painted portraits of the protagonists mixed with images of a huge-bosomed Marianne and a play of light glimmering atop the cathedrals.
Hungarian National Gallery
20 May – 30 September

PREVIEWS:

Parallel films - video remakes, series, ancestor films and tv-shows - Blue Noses
10 June - 31 July
Knoll Gallery
Exhibition curated by Blue Noses (Viacheslav Mizin, Alexander Shaburov). "The new technologies have enabled many people — even those no good at actual painting or sculpting — to succeed as artists. Very soon it turned out that they are also no good at working with the video camera. So video-artists first of all followed the track of film-industry pioneers in order to learn the elements of the profession. Often unaware of it, they re-discovered methods of early silent films — short format, high-motion shooting, double exposure, tricks with camera switching-out invented by Georges Méliès, etc. Then — sometimes without meaning it — video-artists started to compete with media reality, recasting the images of music video, popular TV-series, advertisements, porno films or typical Hollywood blockbusters. The latter ones — in pursuit of steady success with the public — also tend to overdo sequels and repeats. Our exhibition project puts together the whole history of the relationship between video and cinema — from the re-invention of silent film’s  formal techniques to the remakes of cult movies. Oddly enough, among the hopeless opuses under the disguise of video-art one can sometimes find really talented works. Authors of those are our friends – Russian video artists."

Central Europe Revisited III. – An Exhibition of Contemporary Art
11 June -
Esterházy Palace, Eisenstadt
This is the third instalment of the cross-border international contemporary art exhibition hosted by the stately house in 1, Haydngasse situated immediately next to the Esterházy Palace of Eisenstadt, Austria. Curated by Loránd Hegyi Ph.D., an art curator of international standing, the exhibition gives samples of remarkable contemporary art coming from Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Serbia.

Viola Boros: Boom & Crash!
9 June – 17 July
Viltin Gallery
The painter who had lived in Germany for quite a while now presents her paintings that she has painted since her return in 2008 to Hungary. Her sizable collages on canvas and her place-specific installation all refer to abstract-expressionist painting. However, they are all mimetic in their overall character. Coupled with this, there is a certain narrativity arising from newspaper cuttings and texts painted upon the paintings including such tabooed images as those of red stars, swastikas, or busts of Lenin.

Közért 2.1 – A Group Exhibition
8 June – 18 June
Trafó – The House of Contemporary Arts
These are new conceptual works dealing with the likable, but odd fiction of liberty; with democracy both as relic and torture; with equality as a symmetric way of life; with consensus as a maze without pathways; with exclusion and seclusion; with a nation’s constitution written up from acts of eating; with diversity as a huge melting pot; with noisy demonstrations demanding silence.
Students of the Art Academy also engage in creating video works and interactive installations in the closed-circuit common spaces of the Academy and Trafó Gallery where visitors are viewers and viewed persons at the same time.

ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
June 8, 2010

REVIEW:

László Najmányi: The End of the Performance

At 5 pm local time on 31 May, 2010, one of the longest performances of art history came to its conclusion. Since 14 March, i.e. the opening day of her retrospective, Marina Abramović had sat on a chair in the atrium of New York’s Museum of Modern Art for 7 hours each weekday for a total of 700 hours. During the 7 hours of her daily performance she had not eaten or drunk or spoken, even though she is a splendid conversationalist with a fine black Balkans sense of humour, nor had she visited the toilet. She wore evening dresses with long trains, dresses the colours of which would change daily from red to blue to white and back to red. She threw forward the braid of her hair divided in the middle. Her skin was a smooth porcelain white clearly belying her age of 64. She would lean forward slightly in her chair without a word or a blink, looking forward in absorbed attention.
Almost 1400 people sat opposite to her, mostly women since men as a rule are less curious and patient to look into themselves. Many sat several times. Most would sit only a few minutes, some for an entire day (average sitting time was around twenty minutes). Visitors of the retrospective would stand in long lines to be able to sit and be face to face with the artist. Many would recount their experience with tears in their eyes. What they felt, they said, was emotions, enlightenment, a stream of energy. Some had the feeling the artist had a halo of white light, similar to that around the Virgin of Lourdes, around her head.
When recognising familiar faces, a smile would sometimes appear on Marina’s face. She wept several times. The first time occurred when her long-lost partner, Uwe Laysiepen took the chair opposite her. From 1981 through 1987 she had performed similar performances entitled Nightsea Crossing (a reference to Carl Jung’s journey-to-hell metaphor) in 22 large cities across the world.
Many celebrities including Björk, Marisa Tomei, Isabella Rossellini, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed had sat with her over those 700 hours. Young performance artists had tried to capture her attention by various actions. Someone arrived in a Batman costume. Others had donned dresses and coiffures similar to hers. One visitor even proposed marriage to Marina. Those coming back for repeats acquired a kind of fame, or notoriety in view of the length of the line.
Due to Marina’s efforts, public attention has turned again towards performance art, a genre believed to be dead up until now. Again, it became clear that the secret of performance art – rather like that of the theatre – was the focussed presence of a well-composed personality. As far as her archetype, the greatness and power of her soul is concerned, Marina Abramović is queen, a queen of the spirit, of real history. A rare phenomenon indeed in a global society of faceless and mindless masses ruminating on mere shreds of sickly souls.

PREVIEWS:

An Exhibit of György Kovásznai’s Oeuvre
4 June – 26 September
Hungarian National Gallery
György Kovásznai’s oeuvre is one of the most outstanding Hungarian achievements of cold war Europe, a true preparation for post-modernity. Shut off or retreating from exhibitions, declining to join movements, the lonely artist had realised such a high degree of freedom as was treated with utmost caution at the time, nowadays, however, his posterity finds it easy to link up with him precisely because he had spoken such an uninhibited language. His paintings and painter’s films shown at the exhibition belong to the best achievements of the second half of 20th century Hungarian art.

Depero, Futurist
3 June – 22 August
Hungarian National Gallery
Painter, poster artist, and designer, Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) is represented at this show by his paintings, paper works, tapestries, advertising designs (the latter including designs for Campari, Vogue, and Vanity Fair), and picto-plastic theatrical experiments. Complementing the show are some 60 pieces of Hungarian Futurist art including works by Bortnyik, Tihanyi, Uitz, Schadl, Kádár, and Scheiber most of which are on view from the National Gallery’s own collection but some, never before exhibited, are on loan from private collections. Depero’s  100-odd works are on loan from the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, the museum preserving the artist’s bequest.

Godwot – Exhibiting David Wilkinson
1 June – 16 June
Lena & Rosselli Gallery
In his new works made specially for this exhibition Wilkinson deals with iconoclastic ideas, chaos, and havoc. There is a cross among his works that collapses under its own weight. There is broken Chinaware re-shaped and inserted into a new scenario contrary to the original purpose. There is no true logic at this stage of the working process, only the recognition that ultimately all things refer back to themselves. Ultimate decline and loss is the true purpose of artistic expression. If you want to win a war you must not only kill off your opponent, you also have to kill off everything your opponent represents.

Andy Warhol’s BMW Art Car
7 June – 30 June
Palace of the Arts
Founded in 1975, the collection called BMW Art Car contains today 17 works by such world-famous artists as David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. Andy Warhol, the pop-art legend, painted the fourth item of BMW’s art car collection with his own hands. He maintained that the dynamics and speed of cars can be conveyed through artistic means of expression. “If a car is really fast, every line and colour becomes blurred on its chassis. I just loved this car, it moved me much more than other pieces of technology”, he said at the time about BMW’s M1. The car participated at the 1979 Le Mans 24-hour race winning a second prize in its category.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
June 1, 2010

REVIEW:

Lajos Golovics: Weighing Recent Auctions

Auctions run by Judit Virág’s Gallery have long acted as barometers of the Hungarian art market at large. Although some observers have commented on the lack of excitement at Judit Virág’s 17 May auction, I personally feel that deep down there was a definite shift to be registered. No doubt, the usual fare of very nice pictures was on offer (e.g. those by Czóbel, Egry, Mednyánszky, Kondor, Czigány, Patkó, and Vaszary are worth mentioning), and bidding, too, was on the usual, rather enterprising level. Still, when one compares the auction with the preceding ones, there is certainly a re-awakening of the art market to be noted. The first part of the auction was more than promising. In came the pictures, up went the prices, everything went extremely smoothly. However, there was a slow-down in the second part of the auction. We can say that there is a re-awakening taking place, but the situation is still far from reassuring.
Some observers have suggested that the absence of another Hungarian art market giant, Kieselbach Gallery from running auctions lately may have reinforced the importance of such smaller galleries as Belvedere or Abigail. Maybe the gaps between the giants and the dwarfs are not so deep any more. To test this hypothesis, I have consulted the net results of some recent Hungarian art auctions.  (There is no estimated price in the Hungarian auction system.)

Judit Virág	Put-up Prices Total (HUF)	Hammer Prices Total (HUF)	Rise Index (%)
Winter 08	799,420,000	1,071,150,000	134
Spring 09	310,280,000	454,110,000	146
Fall 09	240,430,000	296,510,000	124
Winter 09	383,260,000	485,410,000	127
Spring 10	312,110,000	395,350,000	127

There is a clear watershed between auctions held in 2008 and 2009 respectively: revenues had dropped by more than half. Aware of the credit crunch, Judit Virág had narrowed down her auction selections while keeping up quality. While as late as during the spring of 2009 hammer prices outstripped put-up prices by 146 %, since then, the typical rise has remained around 125 %. (This is closer to the international rise level than earlier, overheated rise levels reaching even 180 %.)
Now, let us see the comparable net results of a recent successful auction run by Belvedere Gallery:

Belvedere May 10

170,200,000

173,538,000

102

These last figures do not underpin a conclusion that the giants may now be very close to the dwarfs even though total revenues are certainly closer than before. While betraying some very hard work for better sales, Belvedere’s rise index, a mere 102 %, still lags behind the sales attraction of a giant auction house. What can be safely said is this: relatively smaller houses like Belvedere can rely on a circle of steady buyers now, and they have carved off their own piece, however modest, from the Hungarian art market cake.

PREVIEWS:

Works of 2007-2010 by László Fehér
29 May – 24 October
István Csók Gallery (King Saint Stephen Museum), Székesfehérvár
One of the most popular masters of contemporary Hungarian figurative painting, László Fehér has put his recent works on view in Székesfehérvár. Here to characterise his work are some appreciative words by critic László Földényi F.: „Fehér not only transforms the figures seen on a photograph, he not only reduces the details or blows up accidental motifs into monumental ones, but he discovers a new world in an everyday spectacle, a world we cannot shrug off right from the moment he discovered it…Men lying around on a riverbank, a child swimming alongside its mother, or the girl climbing up a steep cliff – they are all figures frozen into their own eternity. Remembering death has been one of the grand themes of European art since the Romans. László Fehér continues this tradition without becoming melodramatic or sentimental.”

Concrete Photo, Photogram – A New Exhibit of the Vasarely Museum
26 May – 26 September
Vasarely Museum, Budapest
Existing in the grey zone between photography and art, photograms suck in visitors into a world of creativity and experimenting. Starting from the 1920s, some 40 artists contribute 80 of their works, artists including one of the best-known Hungarian masters of the photogram, László Moholy-Nagy, and such international masters as  Lucien Hervé (also Hungarian by birth), Pierre Garnier, or Thomas Freiler.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
May 25, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: Pécs’ Vasarely Museum Re-Opened – A Smash Missed

The City of Pécs does not spoil art buffs in its Europe’s Cultural Capital Year. The building of a Great Exhibition Hall was dropped (or rather replaced by a B-plan) and the opening of both mega-exhibitions envisioned (that of Bauhaus and The Eight Group of Painters) has been put off until the autumn. The public must make do with such withered shows as that of some copies of Ravenna’s magnificent mosaics, or Mihály Munkácsy’s trilogy of the crucifixion on view in a gym.
The city’s charming museum street, Káptalan Street, however, has been re-furbished with pretty cobble-stones, and the museums on both sides have been re-painted. This includes the memorial house dedicated to expatriate painter Victor Vasarely who had been born in Pécs. Replastered, given new green shutters and a lift for visitors in wheel-chairs, the house also boasts a well-kept back garden. That is about all that has changed.
Needless to say, the museum inside has also been re-ordered, with new spotlights and separate rooms for a projector and Vasarely’s artist wife and son. However, the fact that the museum also holds material from the latter-mentioned artists is discernible for sharp-eyed, caption-browsing museum-goers only. Claire Vasarely had executed her advertising posters and paintings in an almost identical style with her husband while Jean-Pierre Vasarely (aka Yvaral) had applied his father’s poignant Modernism to the digitalised form-language of the 80s.
Renowned member of the French intellectual elite, father of the trend called Op Art in painting, Victor Vasarely had donated several hundred of his works to the city of his birth in the late 60s. Most of the donation is prints, but it also boasts an early (and later re-woven) zebra-rug, many smaller abstract form studies, and a few elegant, though small, objects.
Vasarely had been a magician of stature; his optical genius is effective even today amid the virtual revolution of vision offered by Avatar and its ilk. Educated in avantgarde workshops, he played a thousand virtuoso tricks with the rules of geometry: he squared circles in hundreds of ways. He distorted, shrank, revolved, blew up his images, playing meanwhile with the space surronding them, and also with mirror-effects and the glimmer of his materials. Out of puritanic, minimalist geometric painting he produced a glimmering marketplace of spectacles inducing one to feverish consumption. To what end, we are liable to ask.
A pupil of Sándor Bortnyik and Jean-Paul Sartre, Vasarely firmly believed in socially commited art, something to be produced by the joint effort of chemists, industrialists, engineers, architects, cyberneticians, and artists. For him, optics and geometry were not just idle playthings, let alone building blocks for some self-referential aesthetic products, but much rather basic units of works of art (unités plastiques) to be created by ordinary people. It was out of this very set of forms that he had wanted to build the new visual lingua franca of man travelling in space, i.e. the common language of an interstellar folklore. From those grandiose, Utopian ideals nothing at all can be felt in Pécs.
The way his works are presented here, Vasarely’s aesthetic ideals are hidden behind rather than revealed by his spectacular shapes and forms; there is not a single explanatory sign, not even a biography of the artist, however terse – no wonder, then, that the visitor is practically lost among such hardly informative captions as IBADAN(G) or CHEYT-TYR. It is bad enough that we have crammed our own high-tech Vasarely into an old, domed, shuttered building (to think of the fine row of glass cubes of the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence!), at least we should have provided the necessary explanatory captions. As it is, what we are left with is some blinding op art – and a cultural smash widely missed.
Vasarely Museum, Pécs
From 21 May

PREVIEWS:

Unmistakable Sentences – The Collection Revisited
25 May – 27 February 2011
Ludwig Museum, Budapest – Contemporary Arts Museum
This sample of the new acquisitions of the Ludwig Museum focuses on works that reflect upon the relationship of art and politics. Most works had been created before 1989, i.e. they are representative of the Cold War era.
For more in English: http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=747&menuId...

Lucia Nimcova: An African Thunderstorm (Stamp Poem)
25 May – 23 June
Lumen Gallery
Lucia Nimcova got acquainted with a handmade stamp-manufacturer in the city of Kisumu, during her travel in Kenya. In Kisumu, he was one of the 15 stamp-producers with small tables on the main road.
„For different activities you might need a stamp. If you develop a programme or create an official and legitimate business, you need a real stamp, you pay extra money to get it, sooner or later. If your activity is not so important, or you prefer to avoid police or other individuals to ask money for no reasons, you have to commission professionals to falsify documents. They help to manage all the necessary stamps during your stay in the country, in reasonable time.”
Lucia Nimcova commissioned the stamp expert to create stamps based on the poem entitled An African Thunderstorm, by the Malawian poet, David Rubadiri. During their collaboration, 68 different stamps were created in a month. The poem now is being reconstructed by the artist on the walls of Lumen from its fragmented, stamped images, words and isolated phrases on the backs of photographs, which once were left behind by unknown people in various photographers' studios in.
For more in English: http://photolumen.hu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=234&Itemi...

The Same Stream – Works by Gyula Várnai
21 May – 29 August
Ernst Museum
It is not a retrospective or synoptic exhibit that this outstanding representative of Hungarian neo-conceptualism offers. While it focuses on new pieces, the exhibition also delves into plans or sketches that represent important ideas but have remained unrealized for want of adequate spaces or because of the (space) specificity of the installation.
The starting point for Várnai’s investigations, which he carries out in diverse media, is usually a very simple, everyday situation or thing. His objects and images (projections) are characterized by a reduced set of tools, a simple layout, pairing and omission. His installations and object-collages tend to consist of various objects of use. His assemblages are marked by a conceptual and poetic quality, and an air of meticulous DIY. The creation and destruction of illusion, and the mutual references between signs, texts and objects, are also hallmarks of his activity.
For more in English: http://www.mucsarnok.hu/new_site/index.php?lang=en&t=540&curmenu=201&kov...

Eternal Forms: Houses of Alvar Aalto
20 May – 1 August
Museum of Ethnography
Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) is recognized today as one of the masters of modern architecture and the most influential Finnish architect worldwide. The exhibition highlights four one-family houses that form a varied and fascinating entity in Aalto's extensive output. The buildings presented in the exhibition include The Aalto House, Villa Mairea, Muuratsalo Experimental House and Maison Luis Carré. Elements typical of Aalto, the human scale and strong connection to nature, can be found in all these buildings. At the same time, they reflect the changes that took place in Aalto's production in general.
„There is a hidden motive, too, in architecture, which is always peeping out from around the corner, the idea of creating a paradise. It is the only purpose of our buildings. If we do not carry this idea with us the whole time, all our buildings would be simpler, more trivial and life would become - well, would life amount to anything at all? Every building, every work of architecture, is a symbol which has the aspiration to show that we want to build a paradise on earth for ordinary mortals.” Alvar Aalto, 1958
For more in English: http://www.neprajz.hu/kiallitasok.php?menu=3&kiallitas_id=89

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
May 18, 2010

REVIEW:

Alexa Csizmadia: Vision, voice, trembling by Éva Magyarósi

The fall of video technology became apparent as more and more outlets stopped selling VHS players. Although still used by many, VHS has become a dinosaur on the brink of extinction. When we talk of video’s major role in the art of the last decade, we use the word „video” as a collective term for such media along with video as 16 mm film or even digital technology. A graduate in 2005 of the Visual Communication Department of the Moholy-Nagy Art Academy, Éva Magyarósi certainly prefers the technology last mentioned.
Her film made for her degree entitled „Hanne” won the Grand Prix in 2006 of the Oberhausen International Festival for Shorter Films. Her work entitled „Lena” earned the title of best experimental short film at the 41st Hungarian Film Show. „Lena”, a film of just 12 minutes, is now shown in the Platán Gallery of the Budapest Polish Institute, while the documents related to its making, in Ponton Gallery. The images accompanying the voiceover performed by actress Anikó Für owe a great deal to the visual resources of the Surrealists as well as to the aesthetics of musical viseo-clips. What arises from these resources, however, is the sensitive recording of a peculiar, dreamlike world, a timeless meditation on ties, relationships, emotions, and the changes we bring about as we enter each other’s lives.
The images appearing in the film present a mature female world with an embroidered, rosy, spring-scented essence. Even the sea appears as a universal symbol of femininity here, in a space floating among the genres of painting, film, and photo while anchored fully in a digital age. The voiceover is the chronicle, complete with fine observations, of a mental state immediately following a break-up, a state that could equally reveal itself in a diary entry or in a letter never sent. The person speaking is clearly in a condition of fundamental solitude, and both the images and the narrative organise themselves around the negative space of the enigmatic absence of a missing partner. According to psychoanalyst Darian Leader a major part of feminine sexuality is mulling over the void left by a male sexual partner through forging explanations for the situation that has arisen, a powerful pouring out of all available imaginative material that could fill the void. With each image and each narrative element, this is what Éva Magyarósi’s film suggests: „I know you, and I know myself.”
Platán Gallery of the Polish Institue
8 April – 21 May
Ponton Gallery
11 March – 22 May

REVIEWS:
Show of the Year in Győr: An Omnibus Exhibition of József Rippl-Rónai’s Drawings and Paintings
15 May – 31 July
Győr Municipal Museum of Art
Marking the centenary of one of his principal works, „Still Life with a Mask”, the exhibition brushes off many important pieces of József Rippl-Rónai’s oeuvre. On view are, among many others, „My Father with Uncle Piacsek Drinking Red Wine” (on loan from the Hungarian National Gallery), „Zorka Wearing Black Gloves” (on loan from the Rippl-Rónai Museum), „Still Life with Oranges” (on loan from Tamás Kieselbach’s private collection) as well as virtuoso portraits in pastel of noted literary figures Frigyes Karinthy and Aladár Schöpflin.
For some images: http://www.artmuz.hu/index.asp?inc=kiallitas_reszletek&id=278

First Step to Black & White - Zsombor Barakonyi’s Show
14 May – 3 June
NextArt Gallery
First Step to Black & White is the title of Barakonyi Zsombor, DLA artist's fourth solo exhibition in the NextArt Gallery. The exhibited series show pieces of his newest creative period, whereby the former colorful pictures are replaced by pictures referring to the atmosphere of the black and white photography. The paintings known from the previous exhibitions depicting "Andrassy" and Octogon are extended with images, from which it is not easy to determine where and when they are set. Vienna, Berlin, London or Rome? The eighties, nineties, or the day after tomorrow? Instead of the iconic local symbols and explanatory titles Barakonyi shows the general characteristics of city life. The former "urban guy's" cityscapes are characterized by a cosmopolitan character as well as a sense of timelessness.
For more in English:
http://www.nextartgaleria.hu/?q=webpage/139

Mané & Moné – Ádám Szabó’s and Dezső Szabó’s Show
2010. május 13. – 2010. június 8.
Stúdió Galéria - Fiatal Képzőművészek Stúdiója
It is not only the playful, irreverent reference to Manet and Monet that links up the two artists who had worked together at the Rome Hungarian Academy in 2004 and have been in dialogue ever since. Their peculiarity is engaging in „process-work”, i.e. documentations of their respective works in progress. Ádám Szabó has documented mainly his sculptural video-installations while Dezső Szabó has documented the emergence of his photo-animations.
For more in English: http://studio.c3.hu/studio_galeria/galeria_english/index.html

Contemplation – An Exhibition by László Tenk
13 May – 4 June
KOGART Gallery
For long decades, László Tenk has been exploring the symbolic relationship of natural landscapes vis a vis man’s built environment. His paintings become dynamic through an interchange of plastically thick and transparently thin layers of paint. Alternately melancholic or dramatic, his works of the last few years exhibited at KOGART Gallery draw on two principal sources. First, empty streets at night evoked from his Mediterranean journeys, and, second, motifs from his particular working environment back at home: his studio, his garden, the interiors of his house all inviting and inspiring viewers to move into the philosophical background areas of the scenes seen.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
May 11, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: Sweet Little Trifles – Trends at Viennafair

The main aim of the Viennafair each year is to round up East-Central-Europe’s contemporary market holding up, as it were, our sheer presence in the sea of a global, heavily Anglo-Saxon art market. The carefully selected galleries cater not only star artists of their respective regions but also up-and-coming conceptual ones sensitive to trends. With East-Central-Europe being a medley of smaller communities of artists knowing precious little about their next-door colleagues (even when we count in the Germans and the Poles who are relatively better known throughout), it is a rare occurrence indeed that visitors strolling about the stands can encounter familiar names.
A hoard of unknown works of art that are, however, vaguely familiar. The conceptual strain is strong with an armchair hanging from a rope here, a human figure glued together from mucky rags there, or, a few more yards away, a party game turning around sex tourism and Russian mobsters…
There is also a wide selection of classic oil paintings whether of the meditative abstract or the raw expressionist kind, not to speak of glaring pieces of pop art and virtuoso hyper-realism. However, the usual abundance of oil paintings is overruled here by the copiousness of pretty little „works on paper” framed rather neatly. Graphic art, watercolours, fine little trifles, lyrical sketches. No „horror vacui” here: the intricate drawings sit cosily within large vacuous areas. As if to curb the „sweet little trifle” effect, the frames are typically box-like structures made of white or black timber, and the works are presented en masse, in a geometrical order, gaining thereby a bulky effect in spite of them being just pieces of paper torn out of copybooks. An ideal genre for fairs: easy to pack and transport, the prices are modest with no risks involved, which is extremely fitting for a post-credit-crunch trade.
Hungarian galleries present at Viennafair fit in rather well into this general trend. Viltin Gallery presents some faded technical drawings by Zsolt Tibor, and some fashion watercolours animated upon miniature monitors by Klára Petra Szabó. Inda Gallery, too, keeps abreast with the trends with the help of the black-and-white watercolours by Zsófia Szemző, or indeed Kisterem Gallery, with the red-and-black pencil drawings of Kamilla Szíj, and the cardboard sculptures of Tamás Körösényi, a master of the older generation. Ráday Gallery seems to be more experimental presenting as it is some party marches combined with protecting helmets, an installation by Hajnal Németh accompanied by another installation by London-based script writer Bálint Bolygó. Acb Gallery, however, seems to persist by the usual stuff with the blurred greyish motifs of Róbert Batykó and the paintings of vacuous spaces by Jurriaan Molenaar perked up only by shrines made of computer chips, a work of  Péter Tamás Halász close-by. Based both in Budapest and Vienna, Knoll Gallery betrays the self-assurance of being at home in Vienna by offering its old ware, i.e. figurative paintings by Csaba Nemes and works by Ákos Birkás, a painter well-known across German-speaking Europe.
Messe Wien, Vienna
6 May – 9 May

PREVIEWS:
partition_2.0 / fake – international intermedia exhibition
6 May – 30 May
MODEM - Modern and Contemporary Art Centre, Debrecen
The exhibition presents a wide range of contemporary artistic positions in numerous exciting formats – from video projection through spatial installations to displays of infrared light art. Apart from 20 artists physically present, eleven virtual participants from all continents have also contributed to the project started last autumn.
For more in English: http://www.modemart.hu/?nyelv=en

Before and After, Time in Brackets – a show of Barna Burger’s work
7 May – 27 June
The House of Hungarian Photographers (Manó Mai’s House)
Portrait photography represents time lived through condensed into a picture. If the photographer arranges the portraits in a series, he/she places more emphasis on the time that has elapsed, leaving it to the viewer to imagine the events taking place between the photographs, in certain cases, a person’s entire life. If the series is narrowed down to only two elements, the one showing 'before', the other 'after' some event, this emphasis becomes even stronger. In this project, Barna Burger is working in the field of 'comparative photography', as this genre was once named by Alfred Döblin in connection with the photographs of August Sander. He is not comparing specific occupations, characters or ages, but looking for changes in the individuals.
For much more in English, and some images: http://www.maimano.hu/georgeeastmanterem/20100507_burgerbarna/index_en.h...

The Count, Marabu, and Tomster – a show of comics cartoons
5 May – 28 May
kArton Gallery and Museum
A cluster of comics and cartoon shows are held in Budapest from 5 May in six venues. On 22 May, there is a Comics Festival organised by the Association of Hungarian Catoonists, an event also serving for an awarding ceremony. At kArton Gallery and Museum, the venue of the awarding ceremony, one can relish the work of veteran cartoonist Balázs Gróf who was famous already in the pre-war period, and one of Hungary’s top cartoonists Marabu as well as work by a younger talent, Tamás Pásztor, chronicler of the incredible adventures of Tomster.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
May 4, 2010

REVIEW:

Sándor Juhász: Ravenna Mosaics in Pécs

Proud preserver of superb Early Christian mosaic art, Ravenna had launched in 1951 a „road show” of the partial copies made of the fine mosaics surviving in its famous churches. It was with a lapse of almost 60 years that early this April the show finally arrived in European Cultural Capital Pécs. Its arrival was heralded amid feverish media enthusiasm even though the reality behind the fanfare is more than disturbing. The forty-or-so copies of widely varying sizes have been crammed into the gallery of the stone repository of Pécs’ Dome Museum. Some of the pieces cannot be viewed from a greater distance than a yard. Such mandatory closeness of observation could be tolerated e.g. with graphic art, but surely, 6th century Christian mosaic art could not exactly be described as an art of fine lines and minute workmanship. More than anything else, it conveyed a spiritual message emanating from its rudimentary, almost primitive figures.
Mosaics containing tiny pieces of stone or glass simply cannot be enjoyed unless one sizes them up from a viewing position distant enough from the works themselves. This venue is simply unfit for the presentation of such works. It is a great pity that the Municipality of Pécs had backed out of its original idea of commissioning a new, spacious exhibition hall; had it not done so, apart from the Ravenna mosaics, the three oversize Munkácsy paintings, too, would not have to feel too close for comfort now in an ordinary school building. 
The quality of the explanatory inscriptions is shocking. Ungrammatical sentences and mis-spellings abound, and to make matters worse, there are no accented vowels, letters otherwise so frequent and distinctive in Hungarian. We cannot help but wonder whether the inscriptions printed in Italy beforehand have at least been read at all by anybody understanding Hungarian. 
The greatest failing of the show, however, is that the works, cut off as they are from their original surrounding and compositional unity, tend to lose most of their effectiveness capturing visitors of their original venues so very much. When pushed into a neutral space, they can perhaps hang on to their aesthetic efficacy, but surely, they had not been meant to be viewed in details arbitrarily snatched out of the whole, and at eye-level, and from a mere distance of a couple of yards. As it is, the exhibit can only whet viewers’ appetites for making a pilgrimage to Ravenna’s San Vitale and San Apollinare Cathedrals and all the other Ravenna churches containing the original mosaics.
This, then, is a true „road-show” in that it attracts prospective tourists with the most well-known „product” of an Italian city. The fact that this marketing ploy takes place in Pécs, one of this year’s European Cultural Capitals, is not a problem since no cities are barred from advertising themselves wherever they prefer. The real problem lies with the exhibition strategy of the Municipality of Pécs: the design and execution of this show is so poor as to make it fully unfit to be included in the exhibition programme of an European Cultural Capital. 
Dome Museum and Cella Septichora Visitors’ Centre, Pécs
10 April – 10 May


PREVIEWS:

The Science of Imagination | International Group Exhibition
28 April – 27 June
Ludwig Museum
The exhibition of the works by international contemporary artists deals with the European and North-American culture of the 1945–1989 period, in order to present how the atmosphere of the Cold War era with its scientific facts, ideologies or apocalyptic visions has become a deep and inspiring source of artistic creativity and contemporary culture. Through works by international contemporary artists, the exhibition considers the European and North-American culture of the 1945-1989 period from a specific viewpoint. Darkened by anxiety and competition, the utopia of the Cold War period were often fueled by scientific achievements and technological developments, be it about cities for future societies, the infocommunication revolution, or the arms and space race.
For much more in English: http://lumu.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=728&menuId=43

Master of Graphic Art: Alfons Mucha
30 April – 6 June
Pécs Gallery
One of the most important Art Nouveau artists, Czech painter, graphic artist, scenist and craftsman Alfons Mucha (1860–1939) is introduced here by Pécs Gallery through the courtesy of the Regional Museum of Chrudim, the Moravian Gallery of Brno, the Museum of Ivančice, the Library of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts, and private collector Dr. Zdeněk Třímal.
Mucha’s special talent expressed itself most fully in his ornamental graphic art. Although he made full use of Art Nouveau’s winding tendrils, stylised plant motifs, sensuous lines, beautiful women with flowing hair etc., in his views on art he opted for Symbolism rather than Art Nouveau. His slim posters are special products of turn-of-the-century advertising. Also shown is a seven-piece series of photographs, never before exhibited in this form, personally made by Mucha of his models, as well as some of his book illustrations and publications.

Graven Images – Jubilee Exhibition of József Gaál
30 April – 22 May
Godot Gallery
József Gaál’s latest plastic series(since 2008) is called Graven Images. His painted wooden reliefs occupy a borderline position between painting and sculpture. His earlier rudimentary idols give way to „everyday persons” betraying intellect and emotions: village-dwellers tormented by the hardships of their lives or simply looking about them suspiciously.

AC/BC – A Show by László Karácsonyi, György Szász and Hajnalka Tarr
29 April – 11 June
ACB Gallery
The aim of the group exhibition presenting new works by László Karácsonyi, György Szász and Hajnalka Tarr is to reposition their object-based installation art in the frame of a commercial gallery situation. The starting point of the artists’ objects is to re-organize the elements of our reality into a new artistic presence, which doesn’t carry any everyday functional purpose.

A Constellation of Bones – A Show by Tamás Komoróczky
29 April – 28 May
Neon Gallery
For his new show, Tamás Komoróczky uses formated neon lights and bones. In archaic cultures, bones were used for fortune-telling and other magic purposes. Here, Komoróczky places bones into personal contexts. Endowed with human properties, bones become protagonists of stories conveyed through such media as videos, scale-models, prints, and neon installations.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
April 27, 2010

REVIEW:

Erika Fekete-Horváth: From Square One to Square Two – Introducing This Year’s Derkovits Grantees

Founded in 1955, the Gyula Derkovits Grant has supported artists under 35 for full 55 years. Except for the ideological strings first attached but later falling aside, nothing much has changed about the year-long monthly grants and the introductory collective exhibitions at year’s end. This year’s collective grantee exhibition is not only exciting but also of high quality. Some of the classical genres certainly leave their mark on the material with László Hatházi’s large many-layered canvasses or Dániel Horváth’s paintings of a very special temper. Marcell Esterházy’s 11-piece photo-series presents young men and women while toting the spectacles of the late author Miklós Mészöly; however, rather than evoking a lofty effect, the cult relic looks awful on their distorted faces. Hajnalka Tarr has used traced and re-drawn photographs to make up the pages of her fill-in-the-colours picture-book, an apparent reference to the blank picture-books of her own childhood. The pages already filled in with colours add up to a kind of storyboard upon the walls. With Eszter Sipos, we can even contribute to the work emerging: out of her four circular canvasses one is to be finished following advice given by spectators online or on the spot, using ballot-papers slid into a box. Spectators may also suggest quotations to the artist who during the last three days of the exhibition will include them in her fourth painting. Since it is financial support that connects the works of this collective exhibition, one participant, István Csákány makes an ironic use of this theme in his work exhibited here. Some time back he had received support from the AVIVA Fund to create a timber construction for last year’s Műcsarnok show, a construction looking very much like a sun-deck. At this show he presents the same construction as it was built into his actual home under construction. An ironic comment on the insufficiency of artists’ support, his work explains that as well as to create, an artist should also be able to live on whatever support he/she can muster.
Ernst Museum
28 March – 2 May

PREVIEWS:

Works Old and New by Imre Bukta, István efZámbó, László feLugossy, and András Wahorn
24 April – 20 May
MissionArt Gallery
The four had once lived close by in Szentendre, a stone’s throw from Budapest. Nowadays only efZámbo makes his home there, the other three have moved to the North-East, introducing some fresh country themes into their art. The show presents very early and very current works by all of them, making it hard for art-collectors to pick works for purchase. Hopefully, they will avoid having to make a decision by picking works both from the artists’ early period and from their latest.

A Solid Base – Works by Péter Gálhidy and Attila Rajcsók  
22 April – 4 June
Ani Molnár’s Gallery
It is a rare occasion to find a show out of many hundred put on in Budapest devoted entirely to sculpture. One of the two exhibiting artists, Attila Rajcsók (b. 1983) earned his degree at the Arts Academy only in 2008, and he is determined to stick with sculpture as a full-blown profession. The other sculptor, Péter Gálhidy (b. 1974) is well-known by his colleagues; in fact he has been picked for this double bill because Rajcsók considers Gálhidy his master.

Stubborn Smile – Márton Győri’s Show
20 April – 29 May
Stoll’art Gallery
Back in the early 2000s, as a redress from bland photorealism and concept art, Győri headed the turn to an optimistic, colour-centred kind of abstract painting branded „Neo Pop” in recent Hungarian art. His vehemently glaring, powerfully shaped dashes of colour were created during a period of recluse in his studio. These works of his are aptly complemented by some of his figurative, hitherto unknown paintings.

The Sixth Wall – Introducing János Brückner, Máté Fillér, Barbara Ipsics, Gabi Szép, and Kata Tranker
22 April – 30 April
Labor
The artists (all students of the Arts Academy) meet their visitors in the flesh encouraging them to leave as many marks as they wish. After dismantling their show they are to present a new exhibit consisting of the marks, prints, and responses of their spectators.

Digital Backgrounds - Zsolt Dömsödi’s Show
2010. április 23. – 2010. április 28.
A 38 Ship
Zsolt Dömsödi learned how to draw first from his mother who is a school-teacher of drawing, and then from painter Ferenc Hézső. At 18, he took up interior design and, after two years, graphic design. Meanwhile, he has also executed digital backgrounds for Film Studio4 including backgrounds for the Austrian psycho-thriller Weisse Lilien, and Hellboy 2.

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
April 20, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: Art Fanatics – private collections exhibited on public money?

Budapest’s Műcsarnok (Art Palace) has again lent its luxurious halls to Hungarian private collectors – this time to collectors of the passionate type. But what is it that Hungarian private collectors are doing in the country’s foremost exhibition space?   Private collectors have long played a vital role in the institutionalisation of modern art. Suffice it to refer to the Guggenheims’ museum-founding efforts. One exhibition hall in Leipzig, Germany, has lent its spaces for two full years to various private collectors, and with full curatorial powers. Zsolt Petrányi, Director of Műcsarnok notes in the accompanying booklet with full right that artwork in exhibition halls has come extremely close to artwork in private collections.
For starters, one can savour the „archaic surreal adventure” of village vet Imre Merics spanning feverish collecting of many decades. Masks carved out of old troughs by József Gaál hit it off rather well with a black-and-white canvas by László Fehér and a folksy waxcloth by Imre Bukta, not to speak of a similarly folksy canvas by Imre Bak, and a glaring, UV coloured one by Győző Somogyi. Merics’ village hospitality is apparently boundless.
An entirely different taste pertains to the much more recent collection of Gábor Hunya: an acrimonious, political collection with some Romanian overtones. A wax-sheet of Ceaucescu with angel’s wings, a Coke bottle with Hungarian national colours by Pinczehelyi, a statue of Lenin’s laid into a coffin. Poignant works, no doubt, but they seem to fit the wall of an exhibition hall better than that above a homely couch.
Economist and financial consultant Lajos Barabás presents his compulsory homework of Hungary’s new geometrical painters. This is a stern collection going from hard-edge abstraction to lyric conceptualism. Kassák’s late Bildarchitektur is flanked here by a barrel by Gyula Baditz complete with downpourings of hot wax. From his collection dating back to the mid-80s, István Hoffman sparingly presents only non-figurative pieces including a couple of superb, iconic pictures by Gábor Záborszky and some witty abstract plasic pieces from a glass throne right on to a steel knot. Under the obvious influence of the Somlói-Spengler collection, György Pálfi has caught up with all the latest trends. His youthful stuff is absolutely compatible with stuff usually seen at Műcsarnok or the Budapest Ludwig Museum. So much so, that many of his pieces have been exhibited in both places, including his videos accompanied by documentations that can be treated as exhibits in their own right. 
An equally professional private collection is presented by Péter Kozma, proprietor of the kArton Gallery. Mostly cool, new media stuff starting from Kriszta Nagy’s gigantic canvas of herself vomiting out from a car right on to the melancholy photo-series of desolate spaces by Arion Gábor Kudász. Vacuity and a bad mood, it is as if mechanical reproduction had deprived these works of all traces of a positive aura. Kozma collects art from within the trade just like Ilona Nyakas, proprietess of K.A.S. Gallery who likes to surround herself with sensitive conceptual works in an eclectic way broad enough to include chairs made of garbage timber as well as paintings laid upon TV-monitors. Preferences behind the choices of Attila Bognár (founder of K. Petrys Gallery) are even more difficult to discern; in any case the childish drawings of Bada Dada are quite comfortable with wax-sculptures made by Eszter Csurka.
Finally, there are the artists-cum-collectors. László Fehér (whose own canvas appears in the Merics collection) presents predominantly hyper-realists starting from public-bath graphic works by László Méhes to the photographic factory courtyard of Ábel Szabó. Last among the ten collectors is Pál Gerber whose less-than-fanatic presentation is a postmodern installation of his flea-market acquisitions of much commercial garbage including an amatuer genre-picture as well as a polite Viennese Biedermeier lithograph.
Műcsarnok
2 April – 23 May

PREVIEWS:

The opening of Roham (Onslaught) Magazine’s new gallery
17 April – 5 May
Roham (Onslaught) Gallery - Budapest
Five-year-old Roham Magazine (self-defined as „agressive and fantastic”), the wild offspring of street art, comics, sci-fi, and high literature, is penetrating new territory by opening a gallery offering contemporary artwork, music, and literature, and an informal platform for discussion among artists and artforms.
Exhibiting artists: Baranyai, (b) András, Dorcsinecz, János, Győrffy, László, Füredi, Tamás, Kárpáti, Tibor, Keresztesi, Zsófia, Kiskovács, Eszter, LOBOT, Murányi, Kristóf, Orosz, Richárd, Sirály, Dóri, Stark, Attila, Szöllősi, Géza, Vidák, Zsolt, Vörös, Krisztián.

Late Homecoming – Art in Exile Series No. 1.
16 April – 30 August
Holocaust Memorial Centre
Starting a series presenting artists who had been forced to leave their native country because of the Holocaust, the Memorial Centre first presents some 70 paintings and documents by Edit Bán Kiss, Béla Mészöly Munkás, and Zsigmond Wittmann – excellent artists who had become all but forgotten by Hungary’s public as well as its art professionals. Most of the exhibits had been lent by French and German museums and collectors.
Picture gallery: http://www.hdke.hu/galeria/kiallitas/kesoi-hazateres

When If Not Now? – Artists for Romas’ Rights
16 April – 30 May
Trafó – House for Contemporary Art
Artists with and without Roma roots are engaged in a transcultural exchange. What unites them too will also be the will to deconstruct stereotyped images of Roma life and to look for new and appropriate self-empowered forms of representation. Linked to this are claims which apply at large for marginalized groups, for ethnic minorities and migrants alike – including the principal claim: equal rights for all!
Participating artists: Chto Delat, Nikola Džafo, Pavel Frič & Lukáš Müller, Delaine Le Bas, Damian Le Bas, Lisl Ponger André J. Raatzsch, Emese Benkő, Stalker - Osservatorio Nomade
For more in English: http://www.trafo.hu/statics/trafo_galeria

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
April 13, 2010

REVIEW:

Gábor Rieder: The Other Csinszka (Portraits by Márffy in MODEM)

The lightest kind of French chic made itself felt in Kogart, and now in Debrecen’s MODEM. Curator Zoltán Rockenbauer had opened and closed  the Csinszka dossier in his monograph of painter Ödön Márffy; his montage of recollections had relieved poet Endre Ady’s young widow of most of the accusations levelled against her by literary historians who had never forgiven her for not remaining ”the nation’s widow” for any length of time. Too soon after Ady’s death had she conquered promising poet and editor Mihály Babits, a man of small sexual appetite, an affair soon to be followed by her conquest of gentlemanly painter Ödön Márffy who had earned his fame in the avantgarde group of the Eight some time back. „Ödön – she wrote about Márffy – is a dear, and a remarkable person, probably the most handsome and most perfect male on Earth.” The son of civil servants, Márffy painted one superb portrait of Csinszka after another. Modem’s exhibition embraces the period starting from Ady’s grand funeral in 1919 lasting till Csinszka’s death in 1934. Csinszka, née Berta Boncza, the offspring of a Transylvanian gentry’s family, features on her husband’s portraits as an art deco apparition uniting aristocratic descent with mundane coqueterie. Seen on a portrait dated 1920 her eyes are an angry, icy blue while on a brooding variant her pupils are a pure grey. On another portrait she offers her charms as a fauve nude to her painter husband, sitting without shame on a garden chair among harsh patches of colour brought to life by rugged strokes of the brush. 
MODEM, Debrecen
25 February – 23 May

PREVIEWS:

I Want to Get Married – Luca Gőbölyös’ show
8 April – 29 May
Knoll Gallery
Luca Gőbölyös' work „I want to get married" mixes and ironically contrasts the mass media with the preserved knowledge of traditional communities and archaic rituals practiced or believed by them, meant to ease the task of finding a mate in an ironic way. The five-episode cooking show goes into details on love-related magic tricks that are meant to help single Hungarian women. It presents a model of the entire lifetime of a relationship: finding „The Real One", chaining him, getting married, getting him back or getting rid of him.
For much more in English: http://www.knollgalerie.at/home_bp.html?&L=1

Copies of the Ravenna Mosaics
10 April – 10 May
The Dome Museum and Cella Septichora Visitors’ Centre
Both venues of this travelling exhibit are in Pécs, European Cultural Capital in 2010 along with the Ruhrgebiet and Istambul. The municipality of Ravenna had created this travelling exhibit of mosaics from five early Christian churches some 60 years ago. It has been touring the world ever since its first appearance in Paris in 1951. First the shape of each mosaic piece was copied onto pelure paper, and the shade of its colour noted. The glass sheets then were ordered from Murano and Venice glassmakers, each piece cut out manually and laid into its lime bedding.

Processes III. / Animation – a group exhibition
9 April – 15 May
Videospace Budapest Gallery
Although the genre of animation is used for a varety of purposes, the present exhibition showcases works that reflect a specifically artistic approach. The six artists presented here work with various media: animation is only one of the tools they use as a vehicle for their themes. Individual artistic strategies are reflected in these animations, sometimes resulting in solutions that are unusual in this genre. The spectrum ranges from 3D animations to animated drawings, to electronic noises, vector movements, to animated photos.
Participating artists: Yves Netzhammer (CH), Tamás Komoróczky, Rosa Menkman (NL), Gigi Scaria (India), Eszter Szabó and Tamás Waliczky.
For much more in English: http://www.videospace.c3.hu/prog/2010/pr1004en.html

Where Do We Go From Here? – Young Artists from Hungary and Leipzig (Germany)
7 April – 1 May
2B Gallery
Descendants of the Generation that Drove Trabants now try to turn their artistic viewfinders towards finding their directions in a radically different social environment. Their wishes and aspirations are mixed with a sense of helplessness. The are cognisant of the riddle-like aspects of contemporary society, art, and history as they move about in widely varying media. Eight young artists have gathered together in order to unite their preferences and artistic procedures in a single scenario.
Previously, the exhibit was presented in the Lepzig Kunstraum D21 Gallery.

Et in terra – Exhibit by Lola Kovács and Teréz Szilágyi
8 April – 16 May
Lajos Street Halls of Budapest Gallery
This show will present, along with their respective best pieces so far, a new joint installation of the two entitled Celestial Mirror. This is how the two women-artists have described their procedure: „The pattern of an ancient Roman floor is projected up on the ceiling turning space into reverse. But the shapes of the pieces will re-appear on the floor through the lighting, creating a playful system of shadows.”

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
April 6, 2010

REVIEW:

Hajnal Németh by Gábor Rieder

A black BMW has pulled up in the dark, ruinous interior of Kiscelli Church-cum-Museum. Or rather, it has been trailed up on the hillside by a venturous recovery truck for it is broken up into many pieces. Its bonnet curling up, its front-right undercart off its hinges, the windscreen looking like a cobweb, the front-right door dented, the bumpers hanging sideways, the airbags flopping down. Totalled. A vague smell of lubricating oil, the red spotlights turned on convivially. What on earth is this broken-up BMW doing in what once was a Baroque nave? Hajnal Németh of the first Hungarian intermedia generation has produced a new exhibit, this time in the shape of this BMW and its surroundings. Spending a lot of time in Berlin (where she cruises in a Russian Lada rather than a BMW), the young Hungarian woman-artist usually exhibits videos complete with music and clips in Budapest’s art venues. Even this BMW is surrounded by loudspeakers that continuously transmit a musical dialogue in English reminiscing of an excerpt from an opera. Only on second hearing does one realise that rather than some classical piece, what one hears are car-crashes put to music. Now a woman relates how she had spun off the icy road at a blind corner; now a man remembers the awkward moment when he flew through the windshield because his attention was distracted; now two little kids decide on a scheme how they would both die on the pavement.  Not that the genre of the three dialogues is clear at all. The translations put on music-stands claim they are minutes of some proceedings, but they might just as well come from some Greek tragedy, or from accounts related in a domestic setting, or from some absurd poetry. In any case, the general effect is spotless, with visitors walking around like damage surveyors, eyeing the wreck bathed in red light, and listening to catchy songs relating death-throe experiences in a matter-of-fact manner. – Did you put on your seat-belt? – No. – Was the road icy? – Yes. To make the constellation even more complete, two small-sized statues of the broken-up BMW are also exhibited but only by way of a bonus. Hajnal Németh’s exhibition works like a well-made film with no mulling over concepts, only professionalism and hard-gained experiences. Some contemporary memento mori!
Municipal Gallery – Kiscelli Museum
13 March – 2 May

PREVIEWS:

Colour, light, glitter – Paintings by Ödön Márffy
KOGART, Gábor Kovács Art Foundation
Ödön Márffy (1878-1959) was one of the outstanding figures of early 20th century Hungarian avantgarde painting. He got to know the novelty of Matisse’s and Cézanne’s art in the French capital. On his return to Hungary he co-founded in 1908 the modernist artist group The Eight, while in 1924 he co-founded the New Society of Painters (KÚT). He counted among his friends the top intellectuals of his age including poet Endre Ady, philosopher Lajos Fülep, and painter József Rippl-Rónai. In 1920 he married Endre Ady’s widow, the theme of many enchanting portraits by Márffy. All along his long career he insisted on a sensitive use of colour, the modernist vision, and a Francophile elegance and abundance. 
2 April – 1 August

ART FANATICS – Contemporary art collections 2.
Műcsarnok
The Barabás, Hoffmann, Hunya, K.A.S. –Ilona Nyakas, K. Petrys, Kozma – kArton and Pálfi collections, and the collections of László Fehér, Pál Gerber and Imre Merics.   Curator: Director of Art Palace Zsolt Petrányi.
For much more in English: http://www.mucsarnok.hu/new_site/index.php?lang=en&t=538&curmenu=102
1 April – 23 May

Fresh Air – 10 Years of Land Art at Tolcsva
Miskolc Gallery, Municipal Art Museum
In 1998, the town of Tolcsva had made a move to re-invigorate Hungarian land art by founding a summer camp for land artists. As a fruit of that move the Hungarian art scene has been able to offer a yearly meeting ground for activists of the genre. Now, they have joined their forces to offer their works in an urban setting by adapting their designs to the gallery interior and also by submitting photo and video documentations. „Land art is an attempt to expand art to the size of actual living” (Hatteger). 
31 March – 30 April

An exhibition by Rocco Turi (I)
Szombathely Gallery
Walking the streets of Szombathely, a city he has dwelt for a quarter of a century now, during the summer of 2008 Rocco Turi made occasional stops to record the advertisements exposed to sun, rain, and wind, and also to abuse and batterment. With a sharp-eyed observation of what had remained intact, Turi could retrieve an aesthetic and intellectual synthesis of the original intentions, i.e. material that would otherwise have fallen into oblivion.
30 March – 17 April

Elvis in Budapest – Mobile exhibit by graphic artist Peter Weiler
The nonconformist press launch will take place at 10.30 on the steps outside Budapest’s Art Palace. Launching the exhibit will be Mr Elvis Presley. From this moment on the exhibit will be offered for view on the backs of hundreds of the city’s cyclist messengers for an entire month.
6 April – 6 May

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ARTPORTAL'S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE
March 30, 2010

REVIEW:

Famously Infamous Omara by Mónika Zombori

With the lapse of a few days, two shows by Mara Oláh, cult figure of Hungarian Roma painting were launched in Budapest. Although both venues showcase recent works by Mara Oláh, due to the differing policies of the venues, each show has a special feel to it. The non-profit Liget Gallery had commissioned artist János Sugár and several theory students of the Hungarian College of Arts to devise a highly interesting and intelligent constellation of many small-size works by Mara Oláh, some so small, in fact, as to fit into a cigarette pack. On the other hand, the commercial Karinthy Salon Gallery presents a show entitled Roma - Life - Pictures of her larger and more representative paintings complete with price-tags. The show includes the artist’s less than perfectly satisfying series of portraits of her daughter.

Mara Oláh, or Omara as she is known in the Hungarian art scene, started painting at 43, i.e. 20 years ago. Up till then, she had worked as a charwoman. Apparently, painting was the only channel through which she could overcome the many tragedies that had befallen her private life up to that point. Braving the incomprehension of her environment she not only carried on with her painting but opened the first Roma gallery in her own modest Budapest dwelling in the mid-nineties. Recently, she has opened another gallery in her „luxury shack” that she had built in the small village of Szarvasgede. Over the years Omara has earned quite a name for herself. Some of her paintings were selected for the Vienna MUMOK’s recent Gender Check exhibition. Her art is extremely personal for she relates her own life’s story in her pictures painted on fibreboard, e.g. the occasion when she and seven of her friends wanted to cram into her ramshackle Trabant to earn some money at a nearby wedding; or the moment when she was literally shocked some two years ago by the sheer sight of the Roma shacks of Szarvasgede clearly flouting all EU regulations.

Along with her sense of humour, she is also enraged by the prejudices against Hungary’s Roma population. She relates her own humiliations in a form reminiscing of comics. Enduring multiple discrimination, both as a Roma and as a woman, she is determined to fight discrimination at all costs. Her responses to the social and political lot suffered by Hungary’s Roma are made authentic by her own personal experiences. Her naiveté and charming clumsiness have evoked some criticisms to which she could only respond in one of her paintings: „Not even if I kill myself can I paint like a camera”. In fact, the essence of her art lies elsewhere. The texts included in her pictures painted in lively colours are just as important as the spectacle itself.

PREVIEWS:

The Derkovits Fellowship Awardees 2009
Ernst Museum
Established in 1955, the fellowship relies on the same, unaltered principle: to help talented artists under 35 at the beginning of their career, to foster their artistic development. Out of applicants who in recent years have numbered almost two hundred, a jury of artists and art historians selects ten for the annual grant of the Ministry of Education and Culture. A year later, a review exhibition is held where they present their achievements: based upon the degree of progress in their work programme, they may be entitled to another year of support, or lose their allowance.
For much more: http://mucsarnok.hu/new_site/index.php?lang=en&t=534&curmenu=101
28 March – 02 May

PowerGames
Ludwig Museum
Bosch & Fjord, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Tue Greenfort, Jens Haaning, Ann Lislegaard, Tanja Nellemann Poulsen, Katya Sander, Superflex
PowerGames aims to create a space for showing a wide range of approaches that explore the relations between art and its political and social impact, its possible influence on our community. Featuring works by Danish artists and artist groups, the exhibition endeavours to open a dialogue and to give Hungarian audiences access to attitudes that shape collective thinking and responsible behaviour, exploring critical points on relevant and topical social and economic issues.
For much more: http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=727&menuId...
March 20 – May 30

Eine vs Drez: Two British Designers  
kArton Gallery and Museum
Both British designers rely heavily on typography and popular themes but they relate to those in their own respective ways. They are not only inspired by public spaces but they make their own contribution to what they look like. Eine, „the London letterman” as he has come to be known, had started out as a graffiti artist but today he draws his main inspiration from printed forms of letters. His „street art” covers the shutters of shops in his neighbourhood of London’ East End.
In contrast to Eine’s handwriting style, Drez insists on creating ever new fonts of typographic letters that provide the stuff for his compositions. We can come up against Drez’ work not only in the scripts and logos of various firms but also on T-shirts, baseball-hats, surfboards, etc.  
24 March – 10 April

A Jewellery Box from Denmark
Museum of Applied Arts
The show devised by the Danish Museum of Applied Arts purports to demonstrate the high quality of contemporary Danish jewellery-making in many countries. Danish jewellery-making (especially in silver and in japonerie) was going from strength to strength right through the 20th century. At its stopover in Budapest, the 20th century jewellery collection of the Danish Art Foundation is expected to send Hungarian viewers into fits of admiration.  
21 March – 11 April

Mute Signs
Hungarian University of Fine Arts
Artists: Songül Boyraz (TR/A) Maria Papadimitriou / T.A.M.A (GR), Tamara Moyzes (CZ), Anna Molska & Wojtek Bakowski (PL), Joanna Rajkowska (PL), József Szolnoki (D/H), Katarina Šević (SRB/H), Tamás Zádor (H)  
The international exhibit reflects upon contemporary social phenomena bound up with the acceptance or rejection of otherness, i.e. difference. The works shown – predominantly photographs, videos, and installations – all focus on the relationship of minorities vis à vis the majority, negative prejudices and stereotypes, and symbolisms of national attachment. The signs are „mute”, as the title of the show tells us, because most groups of „others” are barred from voicing their responses to majority prejudices.  
19 March – 16 Apri