HAB’s latest exhibition tells the story of an extraordinary artistic collaboration across the Iron Curtain. One of the main protagonists is the op-art superstar Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), Hungarian-born and emigrated to France, and the other is János Fajó (1937-2018), a Hungarian-born artist who was faithful to the modernist tradition of geometric abstraction but active in socialist Hungary. Not only did they share the recognition of the world-conquering power of modern aesthetic forms, but they also actively contributed to it: their joint work resulted in works of art (silkscreens and multiples) which, although made within the borders of the Hungarian People’s Republic, are part of Vasarely’s oeuvre. Their collaboration fitted in with the op-art master’s long-term Cold War strategy of using his own – popular – art to break the Soviet establishment’s entrenched anti-abstractionism. Vasarely was thinking in planetary terms, as Fajó said of him: ‘he wanted to expand, he wanted to invade the world’. And he helped him to do so, taking advantage of the resurgence of the ’80s art market in the most cheerful barracks masquerade. The exhibition tells this untold story, through Vasarely’s and Fajó’s unseen works together.
Vasarely advocated the proliferation, proliferation and democratisation of art. He imagined that painters who had previously created individual panel paintings would in future work on modern visual object culture, creating a kind of new folk art. He called some of his works “planetary folklore”, extending the scope of his work to the whole planet. To this end, he has been involved in all types of reproduction, whether it be tapestries woven from his motifs, monumental reliefs, mass-produced tiles, patterned porcelain vessels, table-top Plexiglas objects, offset reproductions or screen prints. The exhibition traces the path of this multiplication of patterns through the most popular Vasarely motif in Hungary, the Zebras (Zebres), borrowed from private collections and museums, which were made into an exceptional coat of arms by the Kádár-era cultural policy of fear of abstraction.
For János Fajó, who represented forbidden geometric abstraction, Vasarely, a generation older, was an important role model. In many cases, such as the Cross series in the exhibition, the contemporary abstract language of his paintings is akin to that of Vasarely. In the 1980s, Fajó reproduced many of his works by screen printing, promoting his art from outside the Iron Curtain. In the upstairs spaces of the exhibition, a group of works – four silk-screen folders and seven multiples – resulting from the collaboration between Vasarely and Fajó can be seen. The best Hungarian interpreter of his motifs was János Fajó and the Pesti Workshop he led.
The curator of the exhibition is art historian Gábor Rieder, who has been researching the artistic collaboration between Victor Vasarely and János Fajó for several years with the support of the Fajó Foundation. The exhibition and the accompanying book (Vasarely and Fajó. A novelistic history of an artistic collaboration across the Iron Curtain from the Cold War to capitalism) is an art and cultural history of the collaboration between Vasarely and Fajó across the Iron Curtain.