Álmoskönyv
19 Sep - 25 Oct 2014
ÁLMOSKÖNYV
An exhibition imagined and proposed by Victor Man
19 September – 25 October 2014
Plan B is pleased to announce the opening of Álmoskönyv, an exhibition imagined and proposed by Victor Man, first presented earlier this year at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.
Álmoskönyv brings together six Transylvanian painters and a filmmaker of Hungarian origin, most of them born before 1918 – still at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the Empire dwindled and Transylvania became a part of Romania, the geopolitical, social and cultural constellation in which these artists were raised and activated has dissolved too. In the sinuous trajectories of that historical moment, they came to represent the ‘orphan’ painters, reluctantly ‘adopted’ by the new context. In its turn, the communist regime evacuated these artists from its own rewriting of art history, ignoring the historical and cultural heritage their work carried.
The artists’ work, unjustly considered minor by a hostile cultural majority, has strong ties with contemporaneous Central European practices, and testifies to a strong influence of the German painting school.
Accompanying the paintings, the film Szinbád (an adaptation of Krúdy Gyula’s 1971 book directed by Huszárik Zoltán), allegorizes, in largely oneiric terms, the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
An exhibition imagined and proposed by Victor Man
19 September – 25 October 2014
Plan B is pleased to announce the opening of Álmoskönyv, an exhibition imagined and proposed by Victor Man, first presented earlier this year at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.
Álmoskönyv brings together six Transylvanian painters and a filmmaker of Hungarian origin, most of them born before 1918 – still at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the Empire dwindled and Transylvania became a part of Romania, the geopolitical, social and cultural constellation in which these artists were raised and activated has dissolved too. In the sinuous trajectories of that historical moment, they came to represent the ‘orphan’ painters, reluctantly ‘adopted’ by the new context. In its turn, the communist regime evacuated these artists from its own rewriting of art history, ignoring the historical and cultural heritage their work carried.
The artists’ work, unjustly considered minor by a hostile cultural majority, has strong ties with contemporaneous Central European practices, and testifies to a strong influence of the German painting school.
Accompanying the paintings, the film Szinbád (an adaptation of Krúdy Gyula’s 1971 book directed by Huszárik Zoltán), allegorizes, in largely oneiric terms, the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.