Art on Lake in Budapest
Until the 4th of September, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest will display an innovative exhibition that is already considered as one of the most exciting artistic productions of its kind. Art on Lake exhibits 25 works by artists from 14 European Union countries, which are screened outdoors at City Park Boating Lake.
The contemporary art exhibition continues the tradition of giving local artists the right to display their works. That is why this project has been planned during three last years in cooperation with the EU and the Government of Hungary, whose organization went to the Museum of Fine Arts.
This project has been considered as an extension of the Museum in public spaces. This exhibition changes the walls and corridors of the traditional museums for 35 thousand square meters of natural environment in the middle of the city. In this environment, artists from Belgium, Finland, France, the Czech Republic, Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Romania, Russia, Spain, Slovakia, Italy, England, Austria and Hungary present the best of their work.
The exhibited works are focused in giving visibility to the pressing problems of our time, while giving a positive look at the solutions they might have. In the selection process of the guest artists and their works for the exhibition were involved the Municipal Gallery director Peter Fitz, art historian and curator Krisztina Jerger and independent art historian and exhibition organizer Alexander Tolnay.
In the long list of participating artists are: Susana Solano and Jaume Plensa from Spain, Patrick Poirier from France, Günter Uecker, Via Lewandowsky and Willi Weiner from Germany, Daniel Knorr from Romania, Kristof Kintera from the Czech Republic, The Hungarian artists Róza El-Hassan, Zeno Kelemen, Ilona Németh and Balázs Kicsiny, among many others.
The conceptual sculptures are scattered around the lake and the page http://www.artonlake.hu/ shows a map of the distribution of the works, the artist and a photo of the sculpture.
Susana Solanos work, one of the best representatives of contemporary Spanish sculpture, has an interesting poetical approach referred to the human burden due to the limited natural space in modern cities. It is composed by two elements and the nature of the place that completes the meaning of the work. It consists of a white plane floating on the lake and on it a white boat.
Each sculpture is a visual poetry, there are small floating gardens, metal butterflies perched on the lake, suspended in the water jars, candles that are deployed on the lake, etc. All of them appeal to the beauty of nature and the need to preserve it.
For more information http://www.szepmuveszeti.hu/web/guest/articleview?mi_layout_id=29.30&mi_article_id=846
Nancy Guzman
Art on Lake is a great show not to be missed if you are on holiday in apartments in Budapest Enjoy the most beautiful natural environment of the city.
Translated by: Hans
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The Eight at Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest
The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest will display until the 12th of September an exhibition called The Eight, which includes works by the Group of Eight, whose works represent the best of the Hungarian art inspired by the French modernist currents from the last century. People will have the opportunity to appreciate newly discovered and restored works by some of the artists of this important group.
The story of the meeting of these eight artists dates back to 1909, when they met in the first avant-garde art exhibition in Budapest, in which the audience discovered this talented group of young artists who introduced Cubism and Expressionism, while breaking the classicism of the Hungarian painting.
The Group of Eight was formed by Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Ödön Márffy, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór, Dezső Czigány, Lajos Tihanyi and Károly Kernstok. They were inspired by Henri Matisse and Paul Cezane, considered the fathers of Fauvism, because of their chromatic exaltation based on the color theory that established the primary, secondary and complementary colors.
The impact caused by the Group of Eight in the Hungarian culture was crucial for the development of the modern arts and intellectual vanguard. In their three exhibitions, they gathered artists from various disciplines and intellectual trends among which were the composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, the poet Endre Ady and the philosopher György Lukács.
Róbert Berény was well known for his portrait of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, which was painted in 1913. As well as all members of the Group of Eight, Berény performed several activities in music and literature that were never known. After the fall of the republic in 1919, he immigrated to Berlin, along with many other artists and writers from Hungary. In 1926 he returned to Hungary and won the Szinnyei award in 1936. During World War II, his workshop was destroyed and many of his works were lost forever.
Czóbel Béla was a member of the Group of Eight who was considered as a regarded member of the exclusive Ecole de Paris, a group of the greatest painters of the twentieth century.
Dezső Czigány of gypsy origin studied painting in Paris and dedicated himself to painting portraits and dead nature. His suicide after killing his family condemned his work to ostracism, and that is why it is hard to find his works and references.
Lajos Tihanyi was a painter, illustrator and autodidact lithographer, because he never was able to study due to his condition as deaf-muted person. He was Cubism, although he changed his current through the years.
All painters of the Group of Eight performed wonderful works and were enormously prolific. Many of their works were destroyed during the Second World War.
For more information http://www.szepmuveszeti.hu/web/guest/articleview?mi_layout_id=29.30&mi_article_id=877
Nancy Guzman
An interesting entertainment proposal for this summer. Rent apartments in Budapest and come to discover the paintings of the Group of Eight and its influence in the Hungarian art.
Translated by: Hans
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László Moholy-Nagy in Budapest
Until the 25th of September, the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art will present László Moholy-Nagy’s work in the exhibition The Art of Light, composed by 130 paintings, black and white photographs, color photographs and graphical sketches made after 1922, when he devoted himself to teaching and formulating art theory by joining The Bauhaus School.
The exhibition is organized by the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Circle of Fine Arts from Madrid, Martin-Groups-Bau from Berlín, Germeentemuseum Dem Haag and The Factory, in order to highlight his rich and varied work, specially the theoretical contribution to the modern art in his works focused in light.
Lázlo Moholy-Nagy was born in Bácsborsod, Hungary in 1895. Despite the fact of having studied Law, he opted for art, being considered one of the best photographers of the beginning of the 20th century. He was also a painter and an art theorist. He left a legacy of interesting intellectual work on contemporary art.
He was studying Law when the First World War begun, but the conflict led him to join the army. Later, he dropped out from the University to devote himself to painting with chalk and Indian ink. During the 1920’s, he moved to Berlin and devoted himself totally to experiment with photography and stills, getting impressive results. His stills of 1922 are considered nowadays works of art of incalculable value.
The following year he started leading metal workshops in The Bauhaus School. He also began to investigate the metal effects and stability; besides he introduced photography as a field of study at the Bauhaus.
His first theoretical work appeared in 1925 under the title Painting, Photography, Film, which became the 8th book of the series Bauhaus Books. Moholy-Nagy reflects his investigations about the use of light in photography in his book and he establishes a parallel between light and painting as instruments that can be defined by the color range in an art piece.
His passion for the phenomenon of light in the artistic creation led him to develop structures with movement and cavities through which light is filtrated, in order to see how they drew light and shadow silhouettes as the structures move.
This work involved him in kinetic sculpture, where movement, light and structure form an object that casts a variety of shapes as it moves.
László Moholy-Nagy immigrated to Chicago in 1937 expecting to reach the same success he had reached at the Bauhaus, but he failed and he could only found an art school that did not have a significant impact. He died from Leukemia in 1946 in Chicago.
For more information: http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=768&menuId=44
Nancy Guzman
Seeing and knowing Moholy-Nagy works is a privilege that only a few people can have; so if you are staying at apartments in Budapest you can visit the Ludwig Museum and contemplate the work that this artist made at the beginning of the 20th century.
Translated by: Hans
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Mladen Stilinović at the Ludwig in Budapest
Between the 22nd April – 3rd July, Budapests Ludvig Museum presents a retrospective of Mladen Stilinović – a collection of installations, collages, photographs and books by the neo-avantgarde artist from ex-Yugoslavia.
Mladen Stilinović was born in Zagreb in 1947, and in the 1980s was the director of Medija Proširenih Galerija (Media Gallery), and the co-founder of Galerija Podroom.
Between 1975 and 1980, Stilinović was part of the Six Authors Group, which was formed of conceptual artists interested in the idea of public art, and creating installations in urban areas. Stilinović made placards from basic materials, with provocative, politically critical slogans as well as photographs, newspaper cuttings, and simple phrases written in pen. His work, strongly influenced by the politics of his country, reflects the pain caused by the war which followed the fall of Socialism. He constructs his works based on a dramatic, dynamic narrative, playing with linguistic signs to express the mechanisms of power, and his own artistic fantasy of a world without creative barriers in which dreams and ideas can freely subvert order.
The work which stands out for the originality of its artistic and political theory consists of a piece of pale pink cloth, on which is written in black “An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is no Artist.” Stilinović emphasises and challenges the dominance of English, as the language of globalisation by scoring the “No” in red – an ironic play on words as a form of artistic protest.
Stilinovićs interest in poetry and cinema gives a sequential note to his works – each individual piece has a concept, but viewing them all as a whole gives its meaning. This is an effect repeated in his books, which take on cinematic pace as the pages go on.
In The Praise of Laziness Stilinović posits a profound criticism of the various political systems which governed the world using methods of exploitation and discrimination, maintaing that both socialism and capitalism deny the right of laziness, and condemn it as an evil which leads to vice. The capitalist system, Stilinović points out, only grants the luxury of laziness to a lucky few, whilst everyone else is exploited in order to produce capital wealth. He adds that socialism, which was conceptualised upon bringing an end to work, reversed to praise work as the only way of generating happiness. Finally, he asserts “laziness is the mother of perfection” and that without it, art wouldnt exist.
For more information
http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=760&menuId=44
Nancy Guzman
To discover the work of this interesting anarchist philosophist artist, you just need to go down to the Ludwig Museum if you are in Budapest. To experience spring in the city, rent apartments in Budapest
Translated by: Poppy
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