Exhibitions

A large-scale exhibition of the graphics by Lajos Szalay in the occasion of the artist's 110th birthday.

Those who wrote about Béla Kondor's art soon began to call him the "last icon painter," in a reference to the icon-based period of his work, the universal quality of his worldview, and his monastic humility towards art. This exhibition both selects from the output of this period, and extends the meaning of the term with works that highlight construction.
Kondor liked to use the structure of the cultic sacred images in many works of him, particularly the byzantine hagiographic icons, which represent the lives of the saints. The own series of Iconostasis was motivated by a desire for monumentality. This is a screen that bears icons and separates the sanctuary from the nave: it is a gate between the visible and the invisible worlds. Kondor's Iconostasis it gives insight into the ancient layers of human existence.
Of the two series of book illustrations on view, the ones he made for Shakespeare's Hamlet are representative, thanks to their theme and the woodcut technique, of Kondor's archaizing efforts, evoking medieval images of the danse macabre. As regards Blake's poems, his interpretation of the texts is less strict, and he introduces anachronistic machines and bizarre structures, like so many mementoes of a trip through hell that is both personal and cosmic.

Zsuzsa Péreli’s entire oeuvre is characterized by a relaxed painterliness. However, instead of a painter’s palette, she uses hundreds of spools of coloured yarn to create her dynamic tapestries. Her vision too is like a painter’s, because she does not use a cartoon while working, but keeps the image she realizes on the loom in her head.

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.