I truly gave up writing the mirror book when I realized that the whole world is a mirror, everyone is a mirror, and every work of art is a mirror.”
[Conversation between Sándor Győrffy and László Beke, 2015]
The series of exhibitions organized by Képző in the Barcsay Hall in 2025 will conclude with a tribute to László Beke. The MIRROR/IMAGE is an open, non-hierarchical structure that can be further developed and supplemented by visitors, experts, acquaintances, and friends: “a kind of palimpsest” [Ivan Ladislav Galeta], “an alternative monument to the past” [János Sugár].
“Looking back and looking forward” [Zoltán Érmezei], archaeology & futurology, fiction exhibition: recording traces/fragments of reality of varying status and significance in space and time. Despite/because of the “compulsion to see the whole” [BL], an impossible experiment – drawing around the ABSENCE.
A mind map with thematic nodes, whose main lines are, on the one hand, the branches of the question that has occupied Beke for decades, the MIRROR/IMAGE, its artistic, visual and conceptual, theological and spiritual aspects, and on the other hand, the everyday, “outsourced” tasks to be continued and realized in the future [Kristóf Azbej], a PALIMPSESTS project with to-do lists. The works of Gyula Pauer and Zoltán Érmezei, as well as documents of his work, represent a similar layer in the structure of the exhibition, helping to cover and interpret a significant part of his oeuvre, a “harmonization” of thought.
The spatial forms – the scale-changing wall, panel, and box image structures, text mirror montages [Miklós Erdély], the accumulations, the fan-like rows of panels – are also modes of interpretation. In keeping with the character of the oeuvre, each juxtaposition, intersection, and/or junction touches on and connects new layers of space and time in the horizontal, vertical, and depth directions, generating new directions and vector encounters.
The illustrative tools placed in the space, the (school) blackboards [Beuys, Ben Vautier, Beke and Galeta, Sorin Dumitrescu], play a prominent role in everything, in many different roles: as a wall of remembrance, as carrier, message and display surfaces, framing thematic selections [Aranyalap; Hommage; “Adva van”; Nagybeteg; Ősfotó; P.É.R.Y. Puci; Diagram, etc.], and as “pages” in occasional photo albums. Note-taking, data visualization, recording thought structures, and complex data communication condensed into diagrams.
Art historian László Százados collaborated with visual artist Márta Fehér in the realization of the exhibition concept.