The overall idea of the Sensaria Group coordinated with the Hungarian National Gallery provides a good opportunity, also in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the institution, for the members of the group and artists invited by them to attempt to express their relationship to Hungarian painting tradition. The participating members of the Sensaria Group: Krisztián Horváth, Roland Horváth, Attila Kondor, Lehel Kovács, Dániel László, Tamás Lőrincz, Gábor Megyeri-Horváth, Róbert Sütő, Ábel Szabó. The members of the Sensaria Group are inviting artists thinking along similar lines in the present art environment to co-operate with them, such artists as Márta Czene, Márk Csáky Donát, Zsolt Ferenczy, István Losonczy, Balázs Pálfi, Viktor Surman, Gábor Szenteleki. The historical material includes, among others, such artists for the most part figuring in the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery as Aurél Bernáth, Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, Károly Ferenczy, Adolf Fényes, József Koszta, László Mednyánszky, János Nagy Balogh, Gyula Rudnay.

The sunlight studio at Kossuth utca 21 in Székelyudvarhely, where István Kováts Sr., then István Kováts Jr. and now Árpád Kováts and his wife take photographs of clients, was built in the first decade of the 20th century.

The first part of the exhibition evokes the distinctive atmosphere of a small town photographer’s studio, where visitors can feel the atmosphere of the original studio. Visitors who inspect the photographs taken here will be transported on a journey back in time because they show not only how costumes and fashions changed over the years, but also the people who posed for photographs and the customs associated with the occasions.
The photographers who worked here were patriotic local citizens and at times also acted as photo reporters: guided by their inquiring minds, dedication to their profession or the desire to preserve the family’s store of photographs they also took many photographs outside the studio. Székelyudvarhely, a town famed for its schools, a centre of culture and crafts, and the surrounding villages appear from various aspects in the photographs. At the beginning of the 21st century the studio in Székelyudvarhely is still being used for its original purpose and awaits those who wish to have their picture preserved. Depending on the requirement or mood, they can order Polaroid snaps, digital photos or studio portraits taken before a historical background with a large-format camera.
The exhibition will be interesting for visitors from distant places, but local people and Transylvanians in general will also find much that is new because it includes photographs that have never been seen before by the public. In this way this collection of photographs – an indispensable means for studying the history of the Székely people in the 20th century – becomes part of our cultural heritage.

Emigrants, refugees, world travellers: from the last decades of the 19th century Hungarians arrived in all parts of the world. Among them were star actors who took with them the traditions of Hungarian acting. Many of them gave up their art because only a few succeeded in changing language and acting in the language of the new country. Those who continued performed the classics of Hungarian drama, old popular plays, “smiles and tears” operettas, helping to keep alive the flavours of home in the hearts and souls of Hungarians living in foreign lands. In the dictionary of émigré Hungarians the theatre is not merely a building, not exclusively a community of artists, not a brilliant and splendid spectacle, nor is it the “theatre of exiles”. Is it rather nostalgia? A piece of Hungary. Little Hungary – on the podiums of churches, school theatre halls and Hungarian centres. The theatre of “scattered stars”.
The exhibition shows how emigrant Hungarian theatre artists tried to represent the many-coloured Hungarian theatre culture in the outside world. How they strove to perform the plays regarded as traditional in Hungarian culture on occasions linked to Hungarian national celebrations.
The exhibition displays letters, contracts, playbills, scenery designs and photographs to show the visitor the theatrical manifestations of emigration, enabling us to form a picture of the fate abroad of actors who had become legends in Hungary.

This historical and media art exhibition on Kempelen as scientist, engineer, artist, showman, official and private person also broadens its horizon to give a picture of the Habsburg Empire at the time, the history and art history of Hungary and Central Europe.

The latest station in the Petőfi Literary Museum’s Writers with Baggage series takes us to Berlin. The aim of the series is to examine the influence that affected Hungarian literature in the first half of the last century when it was removed from its own environment in a situation accepted voluntarily or under constraint, in this case in Berlin.
Between 1920 and 1930 Berlin was the European cultural centre producing innovations in the arts, absorbing revolutionary avant-garde aspirations and disseminating them far and wide. Hungarian literature has many different and complex ties to Berlin. At times the city appears as a place in literary texts, such as Sándor Márai’s Confessions of a Bourgeois, or Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti. At other times the fiction, the work of art and the concrete life experiences are intertwined, as in the case of Tibor Déry, Béla Balázs, Ignotus, Aladár Komjáth or Andor Németh. The Hungarians arrived in Berlin at different times, living in isolation, or consciously choosing to form organised groups as special places of Hungarian culture, thereby achieving a dialogue between Hungarian and international culture.
With the help of modern effects and setting, our exhibition gives a glimpse into the special, big city environment inspiring creative work that attracted thousands to Berlin with an influence that is still felt today. Film screenings, readings, theatre performances and concerts will be held in conjunction with the exhibition. We are also planning to show the exhibition at a venue in Germany.

The selection from what is perhaps the world’s most complete collection of artists’ stamps, the Budapest Artpool Art Research Centre, will be shown in the Museum of Fine Arts in spring 2007. Visitors to this unusual exhibition can see around 500 artists’ stamps created by 250 artists in 25 countries.
An exhibition titled Bélyegképek/Stamp Images was held in the Museum of Fine Arts twenty years ago to present the Artpool collection of several thousand international artists’ stamps. The past twenty years have brought general recognition for the artist’s stamp and the Artpool collection has also grown steadily. As the 20th anniversary of the highly successful 1987 exhibition approaches this seems to be the time to bring this exciting, mainly graphic medium once again to the attention of the Hungarian and international public, showing artists’ stamps and the great variety of uses to which they are put and the role they play in international arts communication. The exhibition will be held in the prestigious setting of the Museum of Fine Arts and will also include documentation on the history of artists’ stamps. Thanks to ten years of classification work carried out by Artpool, besides key pieces in the history of artists’ stamps and a selection of stamps created between 1987 and 2007, visitors will also be able to make a virtual tour on the Internet of the entire exhibition held twenty years ago. This means that a visit can be started or continued on foot in the museum or at home in front on a PC.

The content and objects of the exhibition: artists’ self-portraits and artist portraits in 19th-20th century Hungarian art. It will be interesting to see who did a portrait of which artist, because by painting or modelling a portrait the artist can be said to choose a companion from another intellectual field. Most of the objects to be exhibited have been selected from the National Gallery’s own collection, but other museums and private collectors are also sources.

Tamás Vígh (1926) sculptor, winner of the Munkácsy and Kossuth Prizes

The exhibition promises to be a rare and special programme for both Hungarian and foreign visitors. Well established artists living and working in Budapest will exhibit major works, small and large creations characteristic of them and their art. Besides the works they will also display their favourite studio objects, easels and tools. Concerts will also be held in the Gallery during the exhibition.

Invited artists:
Márton Barabás, József Baska, El. Kazovszkij, Eta Erdélyi, Emil Für, Soma J. Guti, Gábor Gyárfás, Zsófia Harmati, Zoltán Hús, Júlia Justin, Gábor Karácsony, András Karakas, Kata Kelemen, Ilona Kardos, Imre Kéri, Ilona Keserü, Mihály Kiss, Péter Balázs Kovács, Tamás Vilmos Kovács, Albert Kováts, Éva Krajcsovics, Ida Lencsés, Ákos Matzon, Gyula Pauer, Péter Prutkay, Katalin Rényi, Zoltán Simon, Péter Stefanovits, Gábor Szerényi, László Táncos, László Varga-Amár, Dóra P. Velich, Véssey Gábor, Anikó Zöld

Since 1992 Zsolt Somlói (38) who works in the media industry and Katalin Spengler (40), journalist and editor have been active in art collecting and the art trade in Hungary. They began their collection of around 300 pieces of contemporary art ten years ago, in 1996. It is now of international interest and they are still adding to it.

The exhibition titled “American abstractions” – Pictures of a foreign study trip gave me the idea of presenting a Hungarian artist who is able to immerse Hungarian art in a foreign cultural environment and then enrich Hungarian art with elements of the culture there that are important for him. In the light of the artist’s work, our idea is to select a few characteristic works from his foreign periods and place the main emphasis on the results of his latest American study trip.
Csaba Szegedi sums up his present American activity: “I am studying space, the possibilities for representing space and its relations and conflicts with the image as a flat surface. Shaping real space and forms, colours and light into visual forms, rhythms and contrasts, the transmutation of space into visual composition is what excites me. This is a process where the higher the level reached in abstraction from reality, and the better it obeys the laws of visual reality, the more successful the picture is. The optimal state in the process of abstraction is reached in the course of successive reworkings. In doing this I try to make the painting process visible in a way that can be followed. I do drawings and generally paint large canvases of cityscapes. The cityscape is only a theme, just a “pretext” to create exciting compositions. For a long time I have wanted to paint New York skyscrapers, and the highways, turnpikes, overpasses and other “anti-painterly” themes.”

“In Hungary – because we are so small compared to the world – it is only worthwhile being an artist, and the painter should only create if he is able to create and preserve his individual character, the individuality of his works. The artist’s aim should not be to follow trends uncritically but to seek what is valuable and “original”. If a talented Hungarian creative artist stays abroad for a while, studies, gathers information as widely as he can on study trips, the result should be that he is able to follow his own individual course as an artist with even greater determination.” Pál Gerzson, painter (Munkácsy Prize-laureate, Artist of Merit)

Eszter Radák is an outstanding young artist with individual character in contemporary Hungarian art. Her panel paintings are characterised by unusual viewpoints, emphasis on surprising details, changes of horizon and perspective. Motifs from the Hungarian rural socio-cultural environment appear in her canvases painted in lively colours, surrounded with firm contours.
She creates a distinctive mode of expression with the fine details of her painting technique, her works are objectively viewed elements of reality and are characterised by a special unity of the abstractions.

Mid-March to mid-April 2007. Each spring the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture holds an exhibition in our rooms of works by winners of its Gyula DERKOVITS art scholarship. For over fifty years this scholarship has been an important yardstick and an important stage in the career of young Hungarian artists and art students.

Born in Székesfehérvár on March 30, 1955. Received a diploma in graphic art at the Hungarian College of Art, later also took part in postgraduate training there up to 1982. Rector of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.
In the eighties Kőnig’s works were technically and in a certain sense also stylistically uniform, while his themes appeared to be quite multifarious. His works painted in traditional, dry Flemish technique fell into roughly four groups, although these were naturally inter-related: one is the group of paintings devoted to the memory of the Baroque illusionist and proto-conceptualist, Andrea Pozzo. The second is the series painted on the basis of amateur photographs, the third is the bestiary-like portrait gallery of insane persons and cripples, and finally the fourth comprises allegorical genre paintings of 19th century literature and science. Apart from external features and the artist’s imprint, works in the various series were linked by the intention that the scenes and portraits painted with archaic realism should function as a sarcastic and in cases malicious allegory.
While the technique remained unchanged, in the nineties fundamental changes could be observed in the themes of Frigyes Kőnig’s paintings. Archaising, seemingly metaphysical city scenes, intimate interiors and still-lifes gave way to more or less fictive genres from literary history or childhood and he produced a series of sarcastically painted naked bathers. However, the change of theme and motifs did not mean a change in the way of seeing things: the intention to create spatial illusion, then its complex and witty analysis and the gesture of confusing and restructuring the perspective remained.
István Hajdu

The exhibition presents works by artists living and working in Transylvania which are an inseparable part of universal Hungarian contemporary art.
The exhibition will be opened by literary historian Lajos Szakolczay, Attila József Prize-laureate and writer on the arts, with a performance by singer Laura Faragó.

Margit Artner
graphic artist

Born in Budapest on January 16, 1954.
1968-72: Secondary School for Fine and Applied Arts, department of artistic metalwork, from 1972 she did illustrations for books (Corvina, Móra publishing houses), daily papers and weekly magazines. She has been doing etchings since 1974 and they now make up the bulk of her work. The themes of her pictures float between dream and wakening. She portrays the things she considers important with detailed precision: grass, trees, pebbles, the Unicorn, the geometrical ornamentations of arcades. She has had exhibitions in countless leading galleries and places in Hungary, as well as in Germany, Japan, Sweden, Italy and Cyprus.

Arnold GROSS
graphic artist

1953: Hungarian College of Fine Arts, his masters were: Gyula Hincz, György Kádár, György Konecsni, Károly Koffán. He twice won the Cracow Biennale Prize; 1955, 1967: Munkácsy Prize; 1987: Artist of Merit; 1995: Kossuth Prize.
The artist is an outstanding, internationally recognised and one of the most individual representatives of Hungarian graphic art. His distinctive sheets are like visions and representations of tales, deeply imbued with humanism, with brilliantly executed minute figures. In this exhibition he also presents new works. His surrealistic etchings with the atmosphere of fairy tales have won international success. His ars poetica is that we are surrounded by so many troubles, problems, sorrow and horror in the world but we must not allow this into art.

The works of Dezső Szabó raise the problem of the interchangeability of the photographic portrait and the person portrayed. His creative method is characterised by media awareness: his works are valid and interesting contributions to a multi-player, multifactorial and above all multi-dimensional visual and more widely artistic, cultural and political discourse.

It is a big challenge for artists to show how they can blend prehistoric art with art of the 21st century. Based on their individual character, emotions and technique their output is outstanding and visitors can see art objects that are a worthy contribution to Hungarian contemporary art.

The biggest sensation of the exhibition is the collection of pieces by Louis Comfort Tiffany that forms part of the glass collection of the Museum of Applied Arts. They are the core of the exhibition presenting around 230 works of art by famous artists of Hungarian and international glass art (such as Emile Gallé, René Lalique, the Viennese Lobmeyr, the Hungarian István Sovánka). Tiffany creations preserved in the Museum of Applied Arts and pieces from private collections will be shown together for the first time.

Our exhibition presents an artist who at the most is remembered as a writer of children’s verse but is little known as an avant-garde artistic innovator despite the fact that his Dimensionist manifesto published in 1936 was signed by such artists as Arp, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and Picabia.

a. Jewellery - platinum, gold, silver
b. Precious stones
c. Natural and cultivated pearls d. Watches and accessories
e. Antique jewellery, decorative objects, furniture
f. Coins
g. Porcelain, decorative ware
h. Wrapping materials, tools
i. Professional organisations, training, publications

Platan Gallery (visual art venue of the Polish Institute, Budapest) put Little Warsaw on display for the third time since 1996. Timea Jerger, curator of the gallery, commissioned a new project of Little Warsaw, which probably exists for the longest time as an artist initiative at the Budapest art scene within the last few decades.

Although it seems almost natural that people joining together to initiate a discourse would disband within a short time, Little Warsaw was able to continuously make collaborative projects for more than ten years. This is rather unusual. Iparterv, Rozsa, Indigo, Ujlak, the forerunners in joined activities at the Budapest context - non of them could keep up with the collaborative way of artist's activity. And this is no different in the international scene. So it is surely quite unique, that an initiative of such kind could pass from the emerging level toward the established one.

Why is it that innovation at a certain level was exclusively up to privileged individuals instead of also being articulated by collaboration of different functional parts? There must be some alternative approaches! This hypothesis is being perseveringly researched by Little Warsaw. In their upcoming work displayed at the Platan Gallery they would reflect on their researches as well as on their own personal contributions to the very issue.

The show grows from a pictorial approach into forms of expression identical with actual social issues. However it uses the specific tradition of the political art of the local Budapest art scene which also roots in the activity of the so called Iparterv circle, for whom Fischl & Weiss or Kukryniksy's collaborative activity served as a model.

Crew Expendable - the title refers to the Alien quadrilogy and to a characteristic scheme of social-psychology. It describes the situation when a crew establishes itself as members of a community which is vulnerable as a whole and this recognition has a striking effect on the personal relations among the members.