Beyond the Social Horizon? - The Mythical, Magical and Spiritual in the Painting in the Years of Transformation

May 14 – July 11, 2026

Opening: May 14, 2026, 7:00 p.m.

Artists: 
Imre Bak, István Bodóczky, László Mulasics, Tamás Soós 

The current part of our exhibition series - presenting the efforts of Hungarian painting in the late 1980s and early 1990s with works that are barely known in the local context because they went straight from the studios abroad - can contribute to a deeper understanding of the period.

A defining phenomenon of the first period of Hungarian painting in the 1980s is the New Sensibility, which, looking back in 1987, art historian Lóránd Hegyi described as three significant, interconnected trends.

He refered with term 'Individual mythologies' to works that connected to different topics of cultural history, ancient mythologies, imagined rituals and myths that seem prehistoric. He used the expression 'New Painting' for the neo-expressionist, abstract and figurative endeavors, defining its historical backgrounds the 'heftige Malerei', while as a precedent of the post-geometry movement, he recalled the constructivism, which was one of the defining ways of thinking and creating in the avant-garde and became synonymous with radical ideas.

He refered with term 'Individual mythologies' to works that connected to different topics of cultural history, ancient mythologies, imagined rituals and myths that seem prehistoric. He used the expression 'New Painting' for the neo-expressionist, abstract, and figurative endeavors, defining its historical backgrounds by the 'heftige Malerei', while as a precedent of the post-geometry movement, he recalled the constructivism, which was one of the defining ways of thinking and creating in the avant-garde and became synonymous with radical ideas.
And although these forms of artistic expression persisted in the second half of the decade, the perception of art changed, and as Hegyi points out in his essay published in the volume entitled Second Public issued by the gallery, deeply intellectual propositions, philosophical and metaphysical content, and even emotional reactions appear in the work of several artists.

The exhibited works display this experience. Tamás Soós's mythological landscape is also a representation of the 'intellectual space' (according to Wilfried Skreiner), and it also denotes a transcendental horizon. László Mulasics's compositions, made almost entirely of monochromatic surfaces and the simplest forms, are also visionary, evoke a sense of timelessness, and reveal a new approach. István Bodóczky's work also refers to the cosmos through a system of geometric shapes, while defining it as a space of both science and spirituality. Imre Bak simultaneously works with forms referring to art deco, hard-edge and signs. The layering of the latter he connected to ancient cultures and post-structuralism as well, but this way of thinking made the stability of signs questionable, thus leading to the ironic reinterpretation of abstract forms.

The broader dimensions missing from everyday life – the transcendent and the spiritual – thus appeared in art during the period of the formation of new social narratives. The 'evoking' and `reconstructing` the imagined myths and rituals of earlier European cultures is working out new practices, that they provided a broader horizon for shaping the present. Quoting Hegyi: 'In this new vision, archetypal motifs and - political and art-historical - facts are intertwined inseparably.'

The apolitical-looking attitude did not necessarily mean a rejecting stance regarding the events of public life. The broader social discourse provided artists the opportunity to work in a different role in the years of change, poetically presenting cultural-historical perspectives, and to turn towards metaphysical thinking beyond everyday debates and the current dialectics. In the context of the private collection from which the exhibited works originate, several also refer to this with humor.