Exhibitions

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.

Zsuzsa Péreli began working in the middle of the 1970s, and several solo and group exhibitions later, in 2001, she was the first foreign artist to be honoured with a solo display in the capital of the Gobelin, in Aubusson, France. Her oeuvre bears witness to the endless possibilities of tapestry as she invests the most common object with complex meanings, making it a thought-provoking vehicle of emotions.

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.

The Kovács Gábor Art Foundation starts the summer with a new exhibition that offers an insight into the KOGART Contemporary Art Collection, which was established in 2007. Presenting seminal works of contemporary Hungarian art in the Palace of Guards at the Castle Garden Bazaar, the display has a dual concept. With the help of the Collection, the exhibition focuses on man—the individual and their surroundings—, as well as on the historical perspective that informs the development of the Collection.

Recollection is reconstruction, the rearrangement of images of times, impressions, scents, sounds, colours and textures. It is a fictitious world we assemble from the bits that are at hand—making the result to conform to our desires more and more with every recollection. István Orosz’s graphic works and Botond Polgár’s sculptures, however, manifest a different kind of mental process or practice.