April 30, 2023 – October, 2023
Location:
Vajda Museum
Curator:
Noémi Szabó
Opening:
29. 04. 2023., 6:00 PM
brochure
catalogue
The basic concept of the Vajda Museum, which reopens in April 2023, is to present a new exhibition every year, in order to unravel the periods in the œuvre of Lajos Vajda (1908–1941), its connections to contemporaneous artistic trends, and the results of the latest research on the artist’s work. Closed for almost a decade, the Vajda Museum now reopens with the exhibition Vajda, the Prophet.
Though he died young, Lajos Vajda became the most important, most influential Hungarian artist of the 20th century, thanks to a work that consciously drew on traditions, which is then revitalized with a progressive approach. Informed by a desire to create a world view, his œuvre was marked by coherence throughout its progress from constructivism and surrealism, through transparent drawings of a completely individual tone, to the organic abstract works of his last years. The structure of the exhibition does not follow a chronological order; assuming a certain synthesis, it begins with the presentation of works Vajda made towards the end of his life, before the rooms that follow shed light on the observations and visual experiments that led him to the abstraction of the great charcoal drawings that put him ahead of his time. This short œuvre, which spanned a mere fifteen years, is thus examined in its entirety and with a focus on the growth of Vajda’s artistic vision, as the exhibition juxtaposes, and studies in parallel, the montages of the early 1930s, the line drawings from ca. 1936, and the visual abstraction that unfolded from 1939 on. As part of the elucidation of Vajda’s working method, several two-sided works are placed on view, many of which have not been exhibited before.