Here are the Hungarian National Gallery exhibitions in 2019

According to the National Gallery, Twentieth-century art is at the focus of the exhibitions at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2019.

Photographs, sculptures, paintings, the poor and the wealthy, reality and what lies beyond, Budapest, Weimar, London, Paris, i.e. all of Europe. The show featuring Salvador Dali and the surrealists will be the sensation of this summer and early autumn. From April to the end of summer, visitors can view 200 fascinating photographs presenting the everyday lives of men-in-the street, selected from the 100 thousand items of the Fortepan archives. The show beginning in late September will pay a brief but all the more meaningful tribute to Philip de László. This small but significant exhibition celebrates the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth in Budapest. It will display some of his greatest works from royal and private collections, highlighting his standing as Hungary’s greatest portrait painter of international reputation. The Gallery’s last exhibition in 2019 will open in the middle of December and will bring to the public the oeuvre of a prominent artists of Hungarian Surrealism, István Farkas, who was murdered in Auschwitz.

EVERY PAST IS MY PAST

17 April – 25 August 2019

Now celebrating the ten-year-anniversary of its foundation, the Fortepan digital photo archives collects photographs taken before 1990; the collection passed the milestone of 100 thousand images at the beginning of 2018. The exhibition will present 500 of this material, all of which are closely connected to the 20th-century history of Hungary but the emphasis will be on private photographs capturing various events seen through the eyes of ordinary people.

The thousands of images in the Fortepan archives, which are free for anyone to use, build up an enormous common family album; as the poet Zsuzsa Rakovszky wrote, “every past is my past”. Taking us on a journey through this shared past, the exhibition evokes familiar memories, often spiced with humour.

THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT FROM MAGRITTE TO DALÍ

Crisis and Revival in 1929

27 June – 20 October 2019

The Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery will mount a large-scale exhibition of surrealist art. The show organised in conjunction with the Centre Pompidou is primarily based on a selection from the rich collection of the Parisian institution.

The exhibition will document the main trends of Surrealism, its central figures and outstanding artists through the extremely eventful period in the movement’s history, the year 1929 fraught with personal and artistic conflict. One of the most noteworthy moments of 1929 was the appearance of Salvador Dalí of Catalonia on the Parisian art scene and his taking the leading role in the group of surrealists. His film made together with Louis Buñuel, Un chien Andalou, debuted that year, and was the first masterpiece of surrealist moving pictures, confirming that the unique perspective and new artistic approach advocated by the movement can be coupled with the most varied technical solutions.