This exhibition provides an insight into the experimental art of Transylvania in the 1980s and 1990s through the works and pedagogical methods of 27 artists and their master, the Târgu Mureș artist and educator Pál Nagy.
The radical artistic turn in Transylvania in the 1980s and 1990s, the importance of MAMŰ (Workshop of Târgu Mureș), the achievements of Atelier 35 in Oradea. These presentations regularly commemorate an artist whose educational impact had a profound influence on the epoch-changing young artists of Transylvania: Pál Nagy, a teacher at the Fine Arts Lyceum in Târgu Mureș. This is the first time that the art of Pál Nagy has been presented in Hungary, also exploring his significance as an art educator. Both the experimental character of his autonomous artworks and such visual practices of his feature here, which he used as supplementary tools in education, while (devoid of declared subversive intentions) he taught the dry-point technique printing on the back of Comrade Ceaușescu’s portrait as “the best quality paper.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, in opposition to Ceauşescu’s totalitarian regime and official ideology, a group of young Hungarian artists from Transylvania emerged, a generation of artistic endeavours in an experimental vein already recognized in Western art at the time, heralding the change of regime from an artistic point of view. This process fed on a very different attitude than its Western counterparts (Hungarian and Western strivings being unknown in Romania at the time) and was primarily driven by the alternetives motives of escaping censorship and confrontation, and of forging and promoting a communal minority existence and Hungarian identity; yet, it endeavoured to create novel and autonomous works in terms of both content and technique. The artists embarked on their own paths and sought answers to their questions in their own, genre-merging approaches: objects, installations, spatial textiles, experimental photography, drawing as an autonomous, full-fledged medium, mail art, process art, action art, and other ephemeral genres were born, while in painting, the characteristics of visualism and re-figurality dominated, with an arte povera impact in the use of materials, partly due to economic and social circumstances.
Pál Nagy and his wife died on June 19, 1979, in a car accident whose circumstances have not been established ever since. His work reveals an activity in which his autonomous artistic practice is inextricably intertwined with his responsibility as an art educator – his person and values are the focus of this exhibition, together with the works of his former disciples.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS*
Jakab Ábrahám (RO) / József Ady (†) / Sándor Antik (RO) / József Baab (Bob) (RO) / Pálma Baász (RO) / Anikó Bodor (HU) / Ioan Bunuș (FR) / Károly Elekes (HU) / Károly Ferenczi (†) / Aladár Garda (DE) / Margit Hideg (CA) / András Katz (IL) / Gyöngyi Kerekes (RO) / Ágnes Lőrincz (DE) / Árpád Miklós (HU) / László József Molnár (HU) / Árpád Pika Nagy (HU) / Pál Nagy (†) / Sarolta Puskai (RO)/ Péter Pusztai (†) / Lívia Zsuzsa Rákosfalvy (DE) / Sándor Sipos (CA) / Zoltán Judóka Szabó (†) / Lóránt Szathmáry (DE) / Zoltán Szilágyi Varga (HU) / Klára Tamás (†) / László Ujvárossy (RO) / Gusztáv Ütő (RO)
* The aesthetic and moral resistance of this generation made its members the starting point of postmodern art in Romania, and they became key figures on the contemporary Hungarian, Romanian, and international art scene. Quite a few of them were forced to leave their homes in the mid-1980s (settling in Hungary, various European cities, Canada, or Israel), and most of their individual work took a different direction; but they have testified that their experimental approach to art had been grounded in the secondary-school teachings of Pál Nagy in the 1970s and in his subsequent professional support and friendship.
Curator: Garami Gréta