Past exhibitions

How will the at once dematerialized and delocalized dynamics of power structures be impacted in both their evident economic and inevitably political manifestations if the network is disconnected? But also, what can still be said or done in the meantime? How does one occupy—or not— what is essentially borrowed time and space, a space-time henceforth to be shared between digital and physical realities.

The exhibition will present a selection of works from the Peter and Irene Ludwig collection that demonstrate the movement’s diversity for the very first time in Europe: the spectrum of artistic forms ranges from mosaics influenced by oriental art, monumental textile collages, paintings, and graphic works through to room-sized installations and video performances.

The exhibition Techniques of Evasion presents a selection from the collection of the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art based on the works of Hungarian artists of the 1960s and '70s. The display focuses on the artistic positions that were not only pushing at the conventional aesthetic boundaries, but also queried the social and political establishment of the authoritarian state.

Members of the Bosch+Bosch group pursued diversified artistic – and partly literary – activities on the boundaries between different branches and genres of art, with the endeavour of expanding these both linguistically and conceptually.

The exhibition of Tamás Király (1952–2013) is the first large-scale, retrospective presentation of an artist in Hungary whose activity cannot be classified into traditional genres and trends. Obviously, his work is mainly related to dressing and fashion, but in his perception, clothing is a border area where fashion, film, theatre, performance and art meet. His clothes are at once costumes, mobile sculptures, futuristic transformations, and the future-looking creations of an artist ahead of his own age.

The Leopold Bloom Art Award, which has been announced every two years since 2011, now for the fifth time, is designed to support the international career building of Hungarian artists. The winner of the 10,000-euro award will be announced by the jury at the Ludwig Museum on June 15th, that is, on the eve of the International Bloomsday celebration, where the finalists will be presented in the exhibition space of Westkunst-Ostkunst.

The exhibition entitled SIGNAL will introduce one of the crucial tendencies present in modern and contemporary Slovak art. It will focus on the origination of and the developments in Conceptual and Post-Conceptual Art from the horizon of the past fifty years in Slovakia, i.e. from the alternative unofficial scene of the 1960s as far as to the legal artistic platform after 1989.

Just a hundred years ago, in 1919, Walter Gropius founded the Weimar Bauhaus, the most important source and milestone of contemporary art, an art workshop and school. Its theory and practice inspired a number of subsequent art movements and approaches, and its original program offered even more: the aesthetic reform of life from everyday life to art. This selection is a kind of attempt to look back: rethink and recall this unique modernist utopia from a contemporary perspective.

Ludwig Museum is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its foundation in 2019. On the occasion of the anniversary, there will be an extraordinary series of exhibitions and programs presenting the history, present and future of the museum. 

The group exhibition IPARTERV 50+ presents a selection from the latest (or, in case of concluded oeuvres, the last) works of the artists who were represented at the Iparterv exhibitions of 1968 and 1969. Additionally, the exhibition features works by contemporary artists reflecting on specific works by Iparterv-artists or the Hungarian neo-avant-garde in general.

Salla Tykkä began her career in the mid-1990s. Her short films have been shown not only at international exhibitions but also in film festival competitions. For her work Giant, also on display at the Ludwig Museum, she received the Canon Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2014.

Both Hungarian and Estonian languages are of Finno-Ugric origin, but the two groups of people that have spread far from each other over the millennia have followed different historical paths. Where do the Northern, Baltic traditions and Central Eastern European history and the common post-socialist experience meet in the 21st century?

The exhibition presents Sam Havadtoy's New York years, when his art was largely impacted by his working relationships with the outstanding artists of the city in the 1970's and 1980's.

Erwin Wurm's works do not follow the traditional expectations of the genre, what's more, the artist attempts to fundamentally rethink sculpture.

The architectural installation of the exhibition Liberty Bridge – New Horizons in the City presents the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in an unprecedented way, in the atrium of which a lookout tower was built on the occasion of this year's Biennial. In the spirit of "free space", the central theme of the Biennial, the exhibition presents an exceptional episode in urban history that puts fundamental urban development issues into a new perspective.

Péter Türk created outstanding works of international quality at every stage of his consistent and coherent oeuvre characterized by a conceptual orientation.

The first major presentation of the Ukrainian contemporary art scene in Hungary is a special occasion to look into the vibrant art of a country full of tensions, which is still largely in the blind spot of the European cultural area.

The exhibition presents recent works by Rafael Yossef Herman known for capturing the hidden existence of the night’s darkness.