The focus of the exhibition is a watercolour series created in recent decades by artist Géza Perneczky, who returned to Hungary after living in Germany for many years. Alongside his works, the exhibition features pieces by Francisco de Goya, Vincent van Gogh, Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Judit Reigl, offering an insight into the themes and artistic solutions that preoccupied artists in the later stages of their careers.
Art history has always favoured thinking in terms of periods, whether we differentiate between creative periods in an artist’s career or distinguish successive stylistic movements in European art. However, it has always focused more attention on the early years of artists, on their earliest influences and the factors that shaped their artistic identity. Until recently, how an artist’s career came to a close was rarely examined. For a long time, the art produced in old age was considered taboo and either interpreted as a decline following a mature period or not presented because it did not fit neatly into the story of an artist’s career.
Nowadays, the concept of a “late style” has become more established in academic discourse, with an increasing number of independent studies, essay volumes, and exhibitions dedicated to the late or last works of various artists. With our exhibition, we aim to show that the works created in the later years of an artist’s career are not somehow belated, but exciting components of their oeuvre. Late works can be an impactful conclusion to an artist’s lifework, a dynamic new beginning of the creative journey, or perhaps a liberated, carefree culmination, born out of joyful play, to a career rich in content. What determines this is not a “set of symptoms” associated with old age but the mindset of the individual.
The complexity of this phenomenon is illustrated by this exhibition of recent works by an elderly artist and thinker who has opened a new chapter with his drawings and paintings of the last few years. Géza Perneczky (Keszthely, 1936) created pieces in a conceptual spirit for many decades, focusing on the visualisation of ideas rather than producing objects that convey thoughts. In Germany in the 1970s and 1980s (having emigrated to Cologne in 1970), he found it natural to keep pace with the international and domestic neo-avant-garde movements, minimalism and conceptualism, but in his early works he also followed the new trends in painting (neo-expressionism, Neue Wilde, Heftige Malerei, trans-avant-garde, etc.).
He is one of the members of his generation who – after moving on from an early neo-avant-garde period – paints and draws to the present day. Perneczky does not pursue any current artistic trend in his paintings and drawings but rather works for himself. Painting fills the hours of his private life, capturing personal moments, experiences, and feelings that are at times happy, at times bittersweet. Dynamic and playful, his figurative drawings appear effortless at first glance but reverberate with the ironic and satirical tone that has defined the entirety of Perneczky’s work, regardless of the period of their creation.
The direct link between his early and late works is the use of rubber-stamp motifs, a Perneczky trademark that appears in all his art on paper and is well known from his early mail art activities.
In the late works of Géza Perneczky – who has recently donated his innovative series of watercolours to the Collection of Prints and Drawings – the sense of abandon, the lack of any underlying content, the immersion in pure spectacle testify to a degree of vitality and classical artistic temperament that is absent in his earlier works.
As in its recent exhibitions, the Collection of Prints and Drawings now also seeks to place new acquisitions within the context of the collection. Perneczky’s works are therefore presented alongside “late pieces” from the oeuvres of other artists. These include Vincent van Gogh’s final graphic work, created just weeks before his death, drawings made by Judit Reigl in her nineties, and compelling late works by a further twelve artists, from Francisco de Goya to Gerhard Richter.