Contemporary Dependencies. Three Generations of the Hungarian Art Scene
The Olomouc Museum of Art has long devoted attention to Hungarian visual art. In 2003, it organised the project Distant Proximity / Close Distance, based on the mutual exchange and presentation of 20th-century art collections from the Olomouc Museum of Art and the museum in Székesfehérvár. This collaboration was later followed by the exhibition Scene of the Action: Pécsi Műhely, which focused on the conceptual and action-based work of a group of artists active in Pécs from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. This exhibition Current Addictions continues this line, yet from a different angle: not as a historical survey, but as a generational study of contemporary visual culture.
Through a selection of works, it traces the transformation of Hungarian art from the fall of the Iron Curtain to today’s post-digital environment. The years of birth of the individual artists are not merely biographical details here, but indicate distinct historical experiences. It is precisely these experiences that have shaped each generation’s relationship to the media, technology, nature, society, the image and their own bodies.
The exhibition is divided into three main sections. The first, entitled Between the Systems, presents the work of artists born in the first half of the 1980s. This ‘generation of transition’ spent their childhood during the late period of state socialism, but came of age during the political and economic transformation of the 1990s. They entered the art scene around the turn of the millennium, that is, in the context of a market economy, a newly emerging gallery scene and advancing internationalisation.
The second section, ‘Inside the Transformation’, shows works by artists born in the late 1980s. This is a generation shaped by the market economy, advertising, popculture, the internet and European integration. Its members entered the art scene around 2010, at a time of economic uncertainty, the rapid development of social media and the associated global sharing of images, information and visual strategies.
The third part of the exhibition project, After the Internet, is dedicated to the work of Generation Z artists, that is, artists born mostly in the second half of the 1990s. For them, digital technologies are no longer a new tool, but a natural environment. The internet, mobile communications, social media, video games and global image databases feature in their work as an integral part of everyday experience. The result is a blurring of the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the traditional and the technological, the high art and the popart.
The time frames for the particular sections are just approximate. Generational experiences overlap, and some works naturally fit into multiple contexts simultaneously. The purpose of this categorisation is not to create three distinct groups, but rather to illustrate the gradual transformation of the conditions in which contemporary Hungarian art is created – from the experience of transformation, through the globalised sharing of images, to a world in which the digital environment helps to determine the very way in which reality is perceived.