Major Moholy-Nagy exhibition and Modernity X Hungary festival in New York

A large-scale exhibition of the work of László Moholy-Nagy opens at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on May 27, nytimes.com writes. More than 300 artworks will be on display, many of which have never been shown in Hungary. The exhibition entitled Moholy-Nagy: Future Present is the biggest display of the works of the Hungarian artist for the past 50 years.

The museum presents a comprehensive exhibition of the multidisciplinary work of Moholy-Nagy, including paintings, sculptures, films, graphic and set designs, different forms of photography such as the camera-less photograms, as well as many experimental pieces that use an array of unconventional materials like plexiglass, aluminium or Formica.

The exhibition showcases the innovative and exceptional style of Moholy-Nagy, whose work is mostly associated with Russian constructivism, but who was also inspired by the Dadaist, Surrealist and Cubist aesthetic of post-WWI Germany. He was born in 1895 in the south of Hungary, studied art in Budapest, served in the war, then moved to Dessau to teach at the Bauhaus. He lived in Amsterdam and London, then finally moved to Chicago in 1937, where he founded the New Bauhaus, now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, which cultivated the Bauhaus school of thought in the US. He died of leukemia in 1946, at the age of 51.

The Future Present exhibition is open until September 7. After its run at the Guggenheim, the exhibition moves to the other two organising institutions, the Art Institute of Chicago between Oct 2 and Jan 3, 2017, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art between Feb 12 and June 18, 2017.

According to artnews.hu, the exhibition is accompanied by the Modernity x Hungary festival in New York that runs between May 7 and August 14. The festival is centred around the cultural heritage of Hungarian modernism. The main event at the Guggenheim is a collection of late modern electronic music inspired by the writings of Moholy-Nagy on the connection between music and visual representation, performed by the György Kurtág, Jr. and the Budapest Music Center.

The programme series also includes two photo exhibitions showcasing more than 170 works by the most important 20^th century Hungarian photographers, such as László Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, Martin Munkácsi, Robert Capa and Brassaï, as well as Neo-avantgarde and contemporary artists whose work might be less familiar for an American and international audience. The exhibitions are major events in the history of Hungarian photography, as a collection of this magnitude has never been shown in New York before.

More info on the programmes of the festival can be found here.

Photo & video: guggenheim.org

Copy editor: bm

Source: nytimes.com; artnews.hu