Space signs

The research exhibition presented at acb Attachment – as the first stage of a research project supported by the Visegrad Fund – through an interview video created for the show, seeks to nuance the relationship between the Hungarian symposium movement (which began in 1968 and reached its heyday in the 1970s) and the art activities that took place at the Bonyhád Enamel Factory.

At the same time, the exhibition is also connected to the history of how these activities at the Bonyhád Factory (relating not only to enamel art) appeared on the avantgarde platforms of the era, thereby outlining the intersection of these two domains. The works on display are selected from the material – conceived mainly in the spirit of geometric abstraction – that members of the former Pécs Workshop submitted in response to a call for works announced in 1971 by art historian László Beke under the title The Artwork = the Documentation of the Idea.

The exhibition will be complemented by the screening of an experimental student film shot in 1961 in the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw by a recently discovered artist of Central European modernism: designer and visual artist Krystian Burda (1935-2015). The film comprised part of Burda’s degree work involving the design of a Chopin monument, which was to employ solutions in terms of form and memory politics that were unusual for the period. The artist’s plan was to erect the monument along the road leading to the Polish composer’s house of birth.

Burda’s oeuvre is linked in multiple ways to ideas formulated by Hungarian artists about public space, landscape interventions, process art, neo-constructivism, as well as works both realised and unrealised, in a space defined by the social and aesthetic intentions of the socialist industry.

Exhibiting artists: Bak Imre, Krystian Burda, Ficzek Ferenc, Hopp-Halász Károly, Kismányoky Károly, Pinczehelyi Sándor, Szijártó Kálmán