Exhibitions

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.

Creating the Corvinus Collection dates back to the construction of the hotel in 1992. The Collection has tracked the continual transformation of the hotel’s interiors. Kempinski Corvinus, Hungary’s first five-star luxury hotel, has accordingly treated the two projects with unprecedented investment and commitment, made manifest in the quality of the materials and the harmonious design details, as well as the display of works of art in the hotel. This approach and policy were unusual, avantgarde at the time, in the local hotel industry as well as in art collectors’ circles.

Born in Kondoros, Hungary, Tibor Csernus found his place in Paris, at Le Bateau-Lavoir, the studio building where Picasso and Braque used to work. Csernus, who threw himself into the current of tradition, created an oeuvre with distinct periods, which developed in an organic manner. The first great turn took place in his art as a result of his first, 1957 visit to Paris, when he came to know the art of Georges Mathieu and Simon Hantaï, and such Surrealists as Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. In 1964 he emigrated to Paris, and went on to live and work there until his death in 2007. Tibor Csernus’s work spanned a long distance from a mode of painting that combined post-impressionism and French avant-garde, through surnaturalism and hyperrealism, to neo-baroque paraphrases of Caravaggio and a completely free and flowing expressive painting.

The major summer exhibition that opens in the Tihany gallery of the Kovács Gábor Art Foundation seeks to represent the early golden age of Hungarian landscape painting through distinctive themes and motifs in its idealizing and romantic varieties.

In cooperation with Tornyai János Museum, Hódmezővásárhely, Kovács Gábor Art Foundation devotes an exhibition to artistic life in Hódmezővásárhely, to be held between 3 June and 29 July, 2018.

Featuring a rich selection of paintings, sculptures and graphic works, the exhibition introduces the rise of painting in the Great Hungarian Plain in the second half of the 19th century, the prominent members of the group of artists who congregated in Hódmezővásárhely in the early 20th century (János Tornyai, Gyula Rudnay, Béla Endre, János Pásztor), the town’s artistic life during the interwar period, and the birth of the Mártély artist retreat. It goes on to describe the history of the Hódmezővásárhely Autumn Salons, the first of which was held in 1954, along with the local artists (György Kohán, D. István Kurucz, József Németh, Ferenc Szalay) and the regular guests (Jenő Barcsay, Menyhért Tóth), portraying, in all, almost a hundred years, from the early 20th century to the political transition.