15. 06. 2025. – 04. 01. 2026.
Location:
ArtMill
Curator:
Zsófia Júlia Szilágyi
Constructed with consistency and created with obsessive precision, an increasingly refined expressive power and unflagging curiosity, László Krasznahorkai’s texts generate an unmistakable universe through the entangled references of recurring motifs and variations on roles. Marked by a metaphysical expansiveness and musical verve, his prose occupies a distinguished place in contemporary Hungarian literature, just as its international recognition continues steadily.
His novels employ apocalyptic visions and grotesque tableaux to demonstrate the intellectual decline of the world, the existential loneliness of man and the futility of the search for meaning, while his aesthetic writings are philosophical inquiries into the limits of beauty, transcendence and human aspiration.
We, his readers are confronted with a world that is expanded endlessly, with fateful books that pursue single sentences. This exhibition recreates the experience of this puzzling, far-from-undemanding encounter not with sections dedicated to the individual novels, but through the palimpsest-like layering of fiction and reality, hero and transcriber (writer), music and visual art.
Interviews with his translators bear witness to his international popularity; Béla Tarr’s films, which were created through mutually inspiring collaborations, appear as extensions of Krasznahorkai’s world; and we dedicate space to the author’s little known relationship to the art scene of Szentendre. By making it difficult to access the objects and contents, introducing detours and ‘obscuring’ the view, the exhibition space seeks to evoke how the long, winding sentences gather momentum, how the magnified details lead to aesthetic digressions, and how the absence of a period can be disquieting.
