Exhibitions

The urban scenes Tibor Csernus painted in the 1990s – against the earlier daylight street views – are usually set in and around bars and cafés, at night. Sunlight gives way to the eerie glare of streetlights and neon signs, with prostitutes, dissolute bohemians and shady-looking characters appearing among the tourists and passers-by, like the cast of a film noir. The transition between the two types is probably represented by the boxing hall scenes, presented in an expressive gloom, smelling of sweat. Even when empty, the bright ring that aggressively jumps forward from the background is suggestive of violence.

In our new exhibition at the Emlékpont, in Hódmezővásárhely, we exhibit the Lenin sculptures of surgeon Csaba Udvardy. After the change of the regime in 1989, the relics of the cult that lost its validity became the prime source of parafrace for pop-art, surrealism, neo-dada and the like. The rebuilt Lenin sculptures use the tools of the visual gags, applications, and word games built on our popular culture to translate the symbolism of the personal cult built by communism.

Béni Ferenczy is a prominent figure of Hungarian sculpture, who has created an art in his mature era that focuses on plastic problems, reviving archaic sculptural principles, which reinterprets the form of antique sculptures with harmony and Greek beauty. The joint exhibition of the Kovács Gábor Art Foundation and the Ferenczy Family Art Foundation focuses on two main themes of the mature era of Ferenczy Béni: the muscular female nudes and the young boy forms. These two archetypes appeared at the same time in Ferenczy's art in a close-up relationship with the sculptor's private life. The predecessor of the strong women was his Transylvanian-born wife, Erzsi, whose son, who had been forced to leave the Soviet Union, became the model of the lonely young boy. The exhibition reveals the state of divorcement and communion simultaneously, as well as the way of artistic walking around of these two motifs in graphics and plastic works.