Prohibition and Tolerance

In 1966 the Young Artists’ Studio decided to exhibit works produced in the studios of young artists without submitting them to a state jury. This unprecedented event, held in the Ernst Museum, caused a great stir in the contemporary arts world long before the well known Iparterv exhibitions.

Besides the room devoted to socialist realism, the exhibition had a surrealist, a pop art and an abstract room, leading to a great debate in the newspapers of the time and in art circles. An attempt was made to repeat the jury-free exhibition in the following year, but the jury of the Fine and Applied Arts Vet Department ruled out many of the works in the exhibition that had already been arranged.

This was followed by organisational disintegration, police proceedings, political and ideological battles, but the two exhibitions irrevocably opened the way to freedom for art. The exhibition attempts to reconstruct the 1966 show with the works that can still be located, together with those that were rejected in 1967. The result is a collection of works that have never been seen together before.