New Exhibitions at the Vasarely Museum in Budapest

In addition to the international group exhibition entitled Central European Concrete - A Selection from the Böhm Collection and the commemorative exhibition in honor of sculptor Katalin Hetey, painter Tamás Konok and sculptor István Haraszty, the Vasarely Museum Budapest is hosting a permanent exhibition of the serigraphs of Victor Vasarely, the eponym of the museum, in the Zichy Castle in Óbuda (Budapest’s District 3).

The collection of serigraphs, which the museum's curators have selected from donations to the Vasarely Collection in recent years, is an important pillar of the comprehensive presentation of the artist's oeuvre, the institution stressed in a statement sent to MTI on Monday.

As the museum reminds, Vasarely used this graphic process, which he considered important, to recreate iconic compositions from different periods of his oeuvre, so the new room of the permanent exhibition presents a kind of summary of the artist's formal constructions after 1947.

Serigraphy is a descendant of simple stencil printing. Vasarely made silkscreen prints in Arcay's printmaking studio from 1953 onwards, under his personal supervision, in signed, numbered editions.

Even in large numbers, the serigraph is a reproduction of the original work of art with a unique aesthetic value, and the prints were commercialized as original works of art, the press release recalls.

For the first time, the Open Structures Art Association (OSAS), which has been organizing exhibitions in the special rooms of the Vasarely Museum Budapest since 2007, is holding a commemorative exhibition entitled ‘Hetey - Konok – Haraszty’, this time in honor of three former artists: sculptor Katalin Hetey (1924-2010), painter Tamás Konok (1930-2020) and sculptor István Haraszty (1934-2022).

As the press release points out, the artists were closely related: all three were members of the generation born between the two world wars, they shared many similarities of vision, and all were awarded the Kossuth Prize for their work. However, they followed different paths, worked in different ways and their works were received differently.

The material in the exhibition, which opened recently, was selected from among the works available today in the artists' estates and from two private collections worth exploring, and is thus largely based on their late creative periods and a few themes, the organizers said.

An exhibition of works from the collection of József Böhm, professor of neurology and art collector, entitled Central European Concrete, opened in March and, like the Hetey - Konok - Haraszty exhibition, will be open until 4 June.