Romanticism/Utopia. Graphic genres and their shared frontiers in the KOGART Collection

The works of young artists and “great masters” are freely juxtaposed to reveal those points of contact that outline matrices of subjects, motifs, forms of construction and cognitive contents. The “following of the tradition,” a fundamental characteristic of post-war art in Hungary, or the personal Arcadias that emerged from the searches for individual directions (Miklós Borsos, Béla Kondor, Imre Szemethy, Judit Fischer), cannot be considered in isolation from the political and social reality of their time. If to varying degrees, this Romantic attitude informs all the works now presented. We also want to propose new possibilities for reception and meaning construction by dislodging the works from their canonized situations and fixed patterns of interpretation. 

While most of the exhibits, nearly a hundred in all, are the works of Hungarian artists, we also selected pieces by foreign artists (Dennis Oppenheim, George Marinciu, Jiří Černický) to offer a glimpse of the international context. The Body, Nature, Science, History: these were the concepts along which we grouped the artistic output of a period that runs from the 1960s to the present.