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The Theatre of Painters. Performances by András Böröcz and László László Révész in the Eighties
⤢In the photograph, the museum building: National Gallery · Christo, CC BY-SA 4.0 ·Wikimedia Commons
<i>András Böröcz</i> (born 1956) and <i>László László Révész</i> (1957–2021) met at the entrance examination of the Academy of Fine Arts, joined <i>Miklós Erdély</i>’s INDIGO group and made performances together from 1977 to 1990. Their contemporaries called it «the theatre of painters»: both had trained as painters, and what they carried onto the stage was things rather than a plot — a sphere, a melon, a gramophone record, a coffin, a candle, a match. Out of these near-trifles grew stranger and stranger constellations, with Shakespeare and Goethe, Mozart and Mussorgsky running alongside. By 1984 they were touring North America; in 1987 they appeared at documenta in Kassel. What survives is shown: documents, the portfolio of 1977–1986 and objects belonging to the performances.
A small show for two. <i>Nicolas Schöffer</i> (1912–1992) and <i>Victor Vasarely</i> (1906–1997) left Hungary for France a few years apart and arrived at the same place from opposite sides: Schöffer at cybernetic art, where movement and light do the work, Vasarely at optical illusion. Lumino and Minieffekt by Schöffer hang against Holld and Doupla by Vasarely. It is the companion piece to the Vasarely 120 retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts; one Vasarely Trio ticket opens both and a third show at Neo. Curated by <i>Mónika Zombori</i> and <i>Vera Pócs</i>.
Gruber lived twenty-seven years, had a few of them to paint in, and left more than a thousand works. The art school would not take him, and from 1952 to 1956 he was a labourer at the Óbuda shipyard; he drew there too, which got him moved to the decorating shop. <i>Aurél Bernáth</i>, who taught him at the Academy from 1959, called him «the little genius». Still lifes, barges, portraits and self-portraits from the National Gallery’s holdings, with loans from Hungarian private collections, are set out in five sections that follow his short road through.
A hundred and fifty things by seventy-five hands — paintings, prints, photographs, sculpture, objects and archaeology — on what Italy meant to Hungarian artists from the nineteenth century to the present. In the nineteenth they went for the academies and for Raphael, Titian and Caravaggio in the churches; <i>Antal Ligeti</i> brought his landscapes back from those journeys, and <i>János Vaszary</i> spoke of Italy as «colour, light, movement, life». The show is part of the Bartók Spring international arts weeks.
The painting installation by <i>Orsi Nyíri</i> (born 1995) was made inside the permanent display «Change of Step» rather than carried there finished: the whole labour went on in front of visitors. Four parts run from conception to disappearance: the painter at the minute the idea arrives; the appetite for life and the dread behind it; the longing for what cannot be had; the going out. On the canvases a sleeping Venus and an Annunciation keep company with lines of <i>William S. Burroughs</i>, a Jesus Lizard T-shirt and a shoe out of Kill Bill. On closing day the installation ceases to exist, and that belongs to the plan. Curated by <i>Katalin Harangozó</i>, <i>Sára Major</i> and <i>Linda Alexandra Tarr</i>.
A hundred artists, designers and makers from across Russia, chosen by the project’s curator. This year’s theme is the image of the future held by those who work with the inheritance of their forebears. In the exhibition complex on Revolution Square.
Tretyakov bought icons in the nineties, a few years before his death. Of this part of his collecting least is known. Sixty-odd panels of the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, many of them shown for the first time: the Novgorod «Predsta Tsaritsa» of the fifteenth century, the Igorevskaya Virgin of Tenderness from the beginning of the sixteenth, work of the tsars’ and the Stroganov masters, got together with the help of dealers and of men who knew old things. Apart from these it is told how the icons came into the rooms of the Gallery and how they travelled Europe in 1929–1932; second floor of the Engineering Building.
Over seven hundred objects: sculpture and painting of Russian Buddhism, almost none of it shown before. More than a hundred sculptures were conserved for the opening.
