This year, the board members of the Young Artists’ Studio Association asked curator and art historian Róna Kopeczky to recommend the shortlist for the Herczeg Klára Award Senior category. The jury, consisting of Marianne Csáky, Szabolcs KissPál, and Zsolt Petrányi, selected the winner from among the three nominees.
The FKSE members were able to nominate candidates for the junior category anonymously, and the winner was selected from the resulting list by this year’s jury, which included Gyula Muskovics, Zsófia Móró and Regina Sárvári from the board, as well as last year’s junior winners, Szilvia Bolla and Áron Lődi.
The three-member jury (Marianne Csáky, Szabolcs KissPál, Zsolt Petrányi) selected Ilona Németh as the senior award winner, praising her as follows:
Since her debut in the 1990s, Ilona Németh (1963) has consistently linked her art to social responsibility, viewing it as a medium that can change society, shape worldviews and communities, and respond critically to processes taking place in the world or in a given country.
Her work draws on her immediate environment, her own life, and her identity. She lives in Dunajská Streda, where, as a member of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, she observes ethnic, gender, and political phenomena: she speaks out against the narrow–mindedness of an increasingly conservative cultural–political milieu, calling attention to real issues related to ethnicity and other matters instead of demagoguery.
After studying painting and typography in the 1990s, Ilona Német sought new forms of media expression. Her installations, public works, and videos deal with the relationship between the individual and power (Morning, video, 2003), the limitations of social integration of minorities (BP Public Art, Budapest, 2007), and the interpretation of national identity (Tükör [Mirror], Győr, 2009). She thematizes the processing of personal (Eight Men, video installation, 2009-2012) and regional history (Eastern Sugar, installation, 2022), which, in her view, contributes significantly to identity and identity politics. An important group of her works are those related to feminism, which analyze the relationship with the environment (Gynecological Private Practice installation, 2002) and social and gender roles (Multifunctional Woman, installation, 1998).
Ilona Németh exhibited at the Slovak Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. In addition to her international exhibitions, she has also made a significant contribution to education. From 2004 to 2019, she was a professor in the Intermedia and Multimedia Department at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, and since 2021, she has been a professor in the Architecture and Design Department at the Slovak University of Technology.
The five-member jury that selected Agg Lili as this year’s junior award winner (Szilvia Bolla, Áron Lődi, Zsófia Móró, Gyula Muskovics, Regina Sárvári) gave the following reasons for their decision:
Lili Agg (1991) is a visual artist living in Budapest, co-founder and active member of the artist-run gallery and collective MŰTŐ, founded in 2016. She studied aesthetics and art history at Eötvös Loránd University, then graduated as a painter from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2018. She began her doctoral studies there in 2020. She has been a member of the Young Artists‘ Studio Association since 2022.
In her research and related creative work she examines the future role of grassroots culture and art. In addition, she reinterprets the concept of utopia through existing theories, presenting it in an intuitive and sensual way in her works. She takes a critical look at the power structures and self-exploitative systems of the cultural and artistic scene.
Her installation works feature a novel interpretation of the visual arts and everyday media, in which he examines and combines elements of painting, new media, panel painting and objects, reality and the digital world as models.
With this award, the jury wishes to highlight not only Agg’s creative and research work, but also her commendable community organizing activities.