Opus Magnum. The work of NATALIA LL
Until the 18th of March, the Ernst Museum in Budapest exhibits Opus Magnum by the Polish artist NATALIA LL. With this retrospective exhibition they pay tribute to the conceptual artist who for 40 years had worked in political feminist art, producing important works in the shape of paintings, drawings, performances, photographs, videos and installations.
NATALIA LL is one of the most famous Polish avant-garde artists. Her experimental art work together with the theory thrown onto various texts has brought her to be a pioneer in various art fields, even making works altering her own body.
Lach Lachowicz, the real name of NATALIA LL, was born in Zywiec, Poland, in 1937. She studied in the Fine Arts School of Wroclaw between 1957 and 1963. In the early 70s she was part of the art collective Permafo, together with artists such as Zbigniew Diuback, Antoni Dzieduszycki and Lachowicz Andrzej, with whom she created an avant-garde contemporary art gallery.
In the 70s, amid the rise of feminist political ideas, she joined the feminist international movement, quickly becoming an outstanding representative, making exhibitions on feminist art in Poland, introducing thought on the role of women in society and its representations through performances.
In the late 60s, influenced by the literature of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, she worked on the investigation of erotic photography and made three works based on it, Intimate Sphere, Velvet Terror and Intimate Photography. With these works she defied the dominant moral rigidness.
In the early 70s she questioned the role of image in society and developed a series of photographic works under the title Consumers Art. Through them she explored the meaning that consumer changes have and submerged herself in a series of post art on the photographic representations of the images that are impossible in photography. Many works came out of this investigation, among them Artificial Cycle.
In the late 70s she discovered the potential that video had, despite it being an expensive technique that was difficult to handle for a non-professional, and she made the works Register Time and Memories.
The 80s were difficult in Poland. The Trade Unions came up strongly in the country and they managed to stop production in most of the country, which meant the implementation of the martial law and, with it, the ethical revaluation in society. This brought NATALIA LL to move her investigation to philosophical and religious subjects. In this period she began a work process with her own body, deconstructing her figure in the work Fear of panic among others.
In the 90s, after the fall of socialism and the opening of the discussion of the origin of evil, she made interesting works such as Sphere of Panic and various other notable works.
For more information: http://www.mucsarnok.hu/new_site/index.php?lang=en&t=630&curmenu=201&kovetkezo_collapse=0
Nancy Guzman
Theres nothing like romance on the shores of the Danube. Rent apartments in Budapest and live the dream atmosphere that this cold-fractured city has.
Rita Ackermann in Budapest
The 18th of November, the Budapest Ludwig Museum opens the exhibition of works by the Hungarian artist Rita Ackermann. The exhibition is curated by Kata Oltai, who has organized it around her latest works which are juxtaposed with some of her early works, within the space given to the Museum of Hungarian artists who have so far been not very well-known.
Rita Ackermann was born in Budapest in 1968. She studied Fine Arts in Hungary. In the late 90s she moved to New York, where she lives and works today. She started her career as a painter and then evolved to complex visual arts, influenced by trends and discussions on art in the United States and her studies at the School of Art in New York. Her complex works reflect her own transformations and became one of the favorites of the underground of New York at the end of the twentieth century.
Her works, interestingly combine different art languages. Music, image and plastic, which adds a variety of languages and particular expressions, typical of the youth or certain social classes that give her a sense of wholeness and content on the world around New York, as a summary of all cultures.
Her series of drawings and collages with pieces of poetic texts reflect the search for answers from a youth that lost its generous dreams for humanity and is now plunged into drugs, alcohol and promiscuous sex, almost like a collective suicide. She is not looking to respond to the existential anxiety with her work. Rather there are only questions, not interpretations or social criticism. Those tasks are left to the viewer, looking respond to and interpret the uncertainties about his/her generation.
Her perspective and story focuses on fertility and pornography. They are diametrically opposed to contrast the procreation and pleasure, in socioculturally terms they are decoupled. Ackermann tries to betray the location of a generation immersed in a society, which is constantly bombarded with messages about pleasure, but when people dare to do what the messages say, thy get punished by the law. This was reflected in her most interesting work Escorpionun, which juxtaposes images and texts.
This is the first stage of work, which opened the way to the stage where Ackermann examines art and the historical process contained and expressed through art, focusing on traditions and concepts of European painting, in contradiction to the U.S. . An interesting look that goes to the debate with the history of art.
Ackermanns work at the Ludwig is an interesting exhibition to appreciate, this symbolic imaginaries of the Hungarian artist, because all of them are her vision of two worlds, the origin and the arts and everyday life.
For more information http://ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=764&menuId=44
Nancy Guzman
The Danube, wide avenues, culture, romance and coffee is what you need for this fall. Just rent apartments in Budapest and come to enjoy the best moments of your life.
Translated by: Hans
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József Szolnoki: Homeopathic Reality in Budapest
Until the 31st of November, the Ernst Museum in Budapest exhibits the interesting exhibition Homeopathic Reality by the Hungarian conceptual artist József Készman. The exhibition explores the transience and the changes, aspects which have marked the memory of Hungary due to the great changes which theyve experimented in the last twenty years.
The exhibition explores through this word which defines a type of medicine, the social and political acts of Hungarian society. Homeopathy is a term which comes from the greek word homolos, which means similar, and pátosz which means suffering or harm. Homeopathy is based on curing illnesses with something similar to what caused the illness, and it has a deep holistic meaning, curing body and soul. A thesis argued by allopathic medicine, especially because its principle is that the patient receives every time concentrates dissolved in water, which will make a bigger impact on the damage.
The work of József Készman is based on this logic and it looks to promote comprehension in a similar way as homeopathic truths. His work tries to confirm the cultural and relational impacts aided by an investigation on the audience, where he explores onirical movements which he then puts into images in his videoart.
József Szolnoki, known as Szokó, is an important Hungarian artist who works with multimedia. He currently lives in Cologne and is a member of the Hungarian art team Kaos Camping.
In his work, he refers us to his childhood expressing the relevant things from that time of his life, which completely defined him, his angst to explain how he became into a communicator first and and then into a party member in the very same week. Confusion and angst are what his questions on coexistence of ideological systems different to the souls and minds of the people express.
Szolnoki looks for the essence and mystery of identity in his work Homeopathic Identity, looking at the Hungarian society as a body which has amplified all the relations with harm derived from the cultural influences which he has lived through in this process of changes which took place in the 20th century, and which are finally the cause of the appearance of identities.
Therefore, just like in homeopathy, Szolnoki proposes that the cure to all pain is to inoculate all that produces harm dissolved in an infinitesimal way, to manage to recover the health and soul of society. This deep work on social pain and angst where memory plays an important role, takes the spectator to get to know the spirit of Hungary.
A great conceptual proposal brought to you by Szolnoki in this exhibition, where he constructs and deconstructs formal language to give meaning to his aesthetic proposal, which has many political art codes.
For more information: http://www.mucsarnok.hu/new_site/index.php?lang=en&t=590&curmenu=106
Nancy Guzman
Hungary and its magic always motivate us to go and visit it. So if you have time and want to enjoy a rest in the stressing final days of the year, remember that you can have a great time in apartments in Budapest with views to the Danube, in one of the most exciting cities in Europe.
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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Site Inspection at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest
With the 20th Anniversary of the first permanent exhibition, the Ludwig Museum presents until the 23rd of October Site Inspection – The Museum on the Museum. The exhibition focuses on the present discussion on the museum and its meaning on art, the artists and the public.
This exhibition is commissioned by Katalin Székely and, together with the museums curatorial team, she looks to expose the great changes that the museum space has gone through down the years and the critique that part of the artists have made in all this art process in the 20th and 21st century.
This ambivalent relationship of the artist with the institution has been regular and permanent in the world of art. A contradictory relationship where the artist requires: it, but at the same time directs his most intense critiques to the social representation space that museums are today: a space of power, a fundamental step in the market and a status mark and work value.
The exhibition puts special emphasis on the avant-gardist call of the 70s, both in the local and international space. This special outlook to avant-gardism is because in some shape or form, its institutional review can be considered a precursor of contemporary thinking spaces on the museum.
But we cant forget previous processes on this critique, like the ones lived by the artists of the so-called avant-garde. Such is the case of Marcel Duchamp, who was one of the first to pose the paradoxes of work and its context, the relation between the artist and the museum and the one between the artist and the spectator.
For the conceptual artists of the 60s and 70s, this becomes crucial. The work loses or gains meaning according to its context and, for this reason, the museums transform into immobile and rigid spaces where the shapes and established spaces for each exhibition become disconnected from its process and from the relation with the spectator. For the avant-garde, the museum is part of the social gearing and, in the same way, ideology, representation of the shapes of social relation and the market in which theyre inserted. For that, its critique and investigation is directed to the social space as a whole.
This interesting and complex situation is well reflected in a series of films and videos that are presented in the film space in the exhibition, with works by artists such as Costa Gavras, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock and Aleksandr Sokurov among others.
The artists that begun the institutional critic through their work or in their investigation projects during the 60s and 70s, they consciously made works that werent marketable and salable, many times, with the idea of carrying out a short or invaluable project for the logic of the market.
That way we can appreciate in this exhibition works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Fraser, Halász Károly, NETRAF, Dalibor Martines, Alan Sekula, Hans Haacke or Azorro Group among others.
For more information: http://ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=782&menuId=43
Nancy Guzman
If your destination option this summer has been to walk along the shores of the Danube and having a relaxing time in apartments in Budapest you cant not visit the impressive Ludwig Museum and walk through this exhibition that gathers great 20th century contemporary artists.
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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