Abstract Narratives: Selected Works from the Collection of Central Bank of Hungary curated by Zsolt Petrányi, Head of Contemporary Art, Hungarian National Gallery

Fridman Gallery is honored to present an exhibition of selected works from the collection of the Central Bank of Hungary (Magyar Nemzeti Bank, MNB), many of which are shown in the United States for the first time.

Among the artistic trends of the twentieth century, abstraction is notable for its ability to continually reinvent itself. It has been enriched by various inspirations, from ecology to design, from science to psychology; its transformations follow changes in our living conditions and in our worldview. Moreover, the meaning we end up ascribing to a work of abstract art is also influenced by our knowledge of the local context specific to the artist.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, abstraction ushered in the new era of modernism, reinventing painting and sculpture to break with traditions of representation. In expressing the technological and social changes of the time, it attempted to create a universal language of cross-cultural understanding, yet always carrying within it local connotations. Abstract Narratives focuses on this phenomenon by presenting abstract artists from a specific part of the world, whose unique approaches raise questions concerning historiography and regionality of art. 

The early development of Hungarian abstraction was influenced by artists with international reach, such as László Moholy-Nagy, Lajos Kassák and György Kepes, who emigrated before or soon after the Second World War. After the communist takeover of Hungary in 1948, abstraction was branded imperialist, bourgeois and anti-working-class. In this context, from the 1960s on, abstraction in Hungary (and other Soviet-bloc countries) was not merely a counterpoint to figuration of social realism, but also a symbol of political resistance and freedom of expression. While adopting international stylistic characteristics like gesture and color-field painting, Hungarian abstraction was also searching for its social, architectural and design role in the local visual culture. Rooted in Kassák’s interest in constructivism and the pure compositions of Moholy-Nagy, the abstract movement was connected with pure forms, clear colors, hard edges and surfaces with unseen brushstrokes. 

The 1980s and the fall of the iron curtain opened the door to new experiments. Even so, the “revival” of the genre did not arrive until the first years of the new millennium, when artists developed new ideas, methods and approaches centered on developments in the media, the internet, digital image editing, graphic computer programs and globalism. In Eastern Europe, the generations who witnessed the Second World War, the communist regime, its unexpected end, and the new, wild capitalism of the 1990s, react differently to new global trends and styles than the younger generations. Artists active today express themselves on a new platform, where technical and formal innovations can be easily compared and distributed through public media. But deep inside their forms and ways of expression still lie personal narratives –– keys to understanding their choice of concepts and methods. Abstract Narratives intends to break down rigid borders of judgment, accepting the fact that abstraction is a global language expressing creativity in borderless frames through personal approaches which have historical, theoretical, and, sometimes, ideological backgrounds.

Exhibiting artists: 

Zsófi BARABÁS, Róbert BATYKÓ, Erika FÁBIÁN, István FELSMANN, Ferenc FICZEK, Márk FRIDVALSZKI, Andreas FOGARASI, György GÁSPÁR, Simon HANTAI, Rita KOSZORÚS, Márton NEMES, Dia PINTÉR, Judit REIGL, Anthony VASQUEZ.

The exhibition is organized by MNB Arts and Culture and supported by the Liszt Institute – Hungarian Cultural Center New York.

About MNB Arts and Culture:

MNB Arts & Culture manages the contemporary art collection of the Central Bank of Hungary and one of its main objectives is to give it international visibility. The works are also made available digitally (https://mnbarts.hu/en/home/), and priority is given to presenting the material of the collection in thematic exhibitions, in Hungary and abroad. The exhibition titled "Movement – Gesture – Sign", is currently on view in Venice in parallel to La Biennale di Venezia. “Calculations and Coincidences” is shown at Istanbuls’s Pera Museum, while “Gut Feeling and Software Grammar” is exhibited at CerModern in Ankara. MNB aims to make the collection accessible to the general public, and, in addition to organizing its own exhibitions, offers a wide range of loans.