Art : Exhibitions in Budapest
7 exhibitions at the museums of Budapest from our list — with dates, venues and what each is worth seeing for.
Two men, one small room. Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) and Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) left Hungary for France within a few years of each other and came at the same problem from opposite sides — Schöffer through cybernetic art, where movement and light do the work, Vasarely through optical illusion. Schöffer’s “Lumino” and “Minieffekt” stand against Vasarely’s “Holld” and “Doupla”. The show is a companion to “Vasarely 120”, the retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts; a single “Vasarely Trio” ticket admits you to both and to a third show at Neo. Curated by Mónika Zombori and Vera Pócs.
A ball, a melon, a record, a coffin, a candle, a match: these were what András Böröcz (born 1956) and László László Révész (1957–2021) carried on stage instead of a plot, and their contemporaries called the result painters’ theatre, since both had taken the painting degree. They had met at the entrance examinations to the Academy, joined Miklós Erdély’s INDIGO group, and performed together from 1977 to 1990, the combinations growing stranger as they went, with Shakespeare and Goethe, Mozart and Mussorgsky running beside them. North America invited them in 1984, documenta in Kassel in 1987. What survives is shown: papers, the portfolio of 1977–1986, and the things the performances were made of.
Between 1952 and 1956 Béla Gruber hauled loads at the Óbuda shipyard, and drew while he was there; the drawings got him moved to the decorating shop. The art school had refused him. He died at twenty-seven, having had a few years in which to paint, and left more than a thousand works behind him. At the Academy from 1959 his teacher Aurél Bernáth called him “the little genius”. Five sections carry that short road through — still lifes, the barges that were in front of him, portraits and self-portraits — out of the National Gallery’s own holdings and out of Hungarian private collections.
János Vaszary spoke of Italy as “colour, light, movement and life”, and the show is about what lay behind such a sentence for Hungarian painters from the nineteenth century to now. In the nineteenth they went for the academies, and for the Raphaels, Titians and Caravaggios still hanging in the churches; Antal Ligeti brought his landscapes back from those journeys. A hundred and fifty works by seventy-five hands are gathered — paintings, prints, photographs, sculpture, objects, archaeology. The show opened with Bartók Spring, the international arts weeks.
Whole engraved cycles on the Book of Revelation are rare, and the ones that decided how Europe pictured the end of the world are gathered here. Albrecht Dürer set the pattern, and printmakers kept inside it for two hundred years; what shifts from sheet to sheet is doctrine, and it shifts in the composition rather than beside it. Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop follow, the burin plates of Jean Duvet, the lithographs Odilon Redon published in 1899. Hungarians of the twentieth century have the last word, and above all Béla Kondor, whose “Apocalypse with Dolls and Machines” dates from 1956.
Nothing here was carried in finished. Orsi Nyíri (born 1995) painted the installation where it stands, inside the permanent display “Change of Step”, with visitors watching the work go on. It falls into four parts — the minute an idea arrives, the appetite and the dread that come after it, the wanting of what is out of reach, the going out — and the canvases keep odd company: a sleeping Venus and an Annunciation beside lines of William S. Burroughs, a Jesus Lizard T-shirt, a shoe out of “Kill Bill”. On the closing day it will be destroyed; that was the intention from the start. Curated by Katalin Harangozó, Sára Major and Linda Alexandra Tarr.
A slab of limestone covered with pupils’ drawings, made somewhere between the thirteenth and the eleventh century BC, says more about the trade than any finished wall. That is the subject here: what materials were to hand, what rules governed the drawing, where the hand went wrong and how the mistake was put right. A relief recut for the princess Meritaten under Akhenaten is shown, and a sculptor’s model with a ram’s head from the Late Period. Most of it comes from the museum’s own Egyptian department, with loans from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and the Museo Egizio in Turin; the corrections themselves were found by laboratory work of the past few years. Curated by Katalin Anna Kóthay and Flóra Judit Kövei.