Conceived by Róna Kopeczky, curator of the Hungarian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2024), this group show plunges visitors into the heart of the contemporary Hungarian art scene.
Artists:
Ádám ALBERT, Róbert BATYKÓ, Dániel BERNÁTH, Veronika CSONKA, József CSATÓ, EJTECH (Judit Eszter KÁRPÁTI and Esteban DE LA TORRE), Ákos EZER, Gideon HORVÁTH, Zsófia KERESZTES, Katalin KORTMANN-JÁRAY & Karina MENDRECZKY, Bence MAGYARLAKI, Mira MAKAI, Tamás MELKOVICS, Eszter METZING, Zsolt MOLNÁR, Luca Sára RÓZSA, Rita SÜVEGES and Kata TRANKER.
The exhibition features the selected works of 18 emerging and mid-career artists using a great variety of media and dealing in a personal, sensitive, eerie or poetic manner with environmental, existential topics, cultural history, identityand hybridity, or actual societal phenomena.
Experimenting with bold combinations of materials or evolving within the boundaries of traditional art forms, the artists voice eco-critical approaches of nature representation, question the relation between individual and society, mankind and its environment, or explore concepts of collective memory, remembrance and bodily experience. The exhibition conveys anunsettling andambivalent atmosphere thatbalances between flourishing and decadence, sensuality and virtuality, figuration and abstraction, analogue and digital, real and surreal, archaic and contemporary.
In the last decades, the Hungarian contemporary art scene has experienced a certain degree of exoticisation achieved through a massive focus both in institutions and at art fairson the conceptual and critical production of Neo-Avant-Garde artists between the second part of the 1960s andthe early 1980s. Generally working with an economy of means unfolding in photography, objects, installations, collages or visual poetry, this pioneering generation has operated with DYI aesthetics and worked in smaller scales due to financial and technical limitations, but also due to the precarious status of the visual artist,often considered by the Socialist regime as apotentiallyproblematic, turbulent element of society. This image somewhat became the “sex-appeal” of Central and Eastern European art from the point of view of Western European and American institutions and still persists to this day.
To break out of this stereotype is not an easy task, but the generation of artists featured in the exhibition Constellations clearly demonstrate this endeavourtowards abundance, profusion, and the aim to break out ofthe limiting mediatic frames of their predecessors. While preserving the critically conceptual, ambiguous, contextually complexcontentsof the pioneering generation, the artists featured in Constellations inhabit larger scales, occupy the space and usemediums that have diversified and grown in sophistication. They do not bear any more the clearly recognizable traits of what one could call the “Eastern European Neo-Avant-Garde low-tech chic”.
Escaping from rigorously minimal aesthetics, the works showcased in the exhibition form a curious profusion of forms, colours and materials that despite their bright, colourful tones bear the ambiguous marks of our time, balancing between serenityand anxiety, joy and melancholy. The exhibition also showcases pieces that are emphasizing tactility over digitality–even when their principal medium is a new technology such as 3D pen, 3D printing, laser cutting or sound animation –, which reveals how much we crave the simple act of touching in a dematerialised world that has never been so connected yet so dividing.
Text by Róna Kopeczky
Róna Kopeczky is a French-Hungarian art historian and curator specialised in contemporary art. She worked as curator of international art at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest between 2006 and 2015, then joined the city’s leading contemporary art gallery, acb, as artistic director. In 2024, she curated the Hungarian pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Her curatorial practice also includes contributions to international projects that enhance the visibility of the Hungarian and Central-Eastern European Contemporary art scene such as the first and second editions of OFF-Biennále Budapest in 2015 and 2017, Manifesta 14 in Pristhina in 2022, and Secondary Archive (2021-ongoing).
Publications :
– Együttállások – fiatal magyar képzőművészek Párizsban, A mű, 19th May 2025