Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered (1916–1923)

Due to the fact that most of the pieces in Moholy-Nagy’s oeuvre are in the possession of foreign museums and private collectors, there has never before been a comprehensive presentation of his early works in Hungary. The exhibition specifically focuses on the beginnings of his career and his early artistic evolution.

Born in southern Hungary in 1895, László Moholy-Nagy is one of the most internationally influential Hungarian artists. He has inspired generations of artists and designers to view the world and artistic media in fresh ways.

Presenting Moholy-Nagy in his early Hungarian and German contexts, the exhibition shows his meteoric rise as an artist from his wartime sketches on military-issue postcards to being hired as a professor for the Bauhaus in 1923. Particular attention is given to the development of his artistic conception based on Hungarian activism, the Russian avant-garde and the German Reformbewegung, all of which led to his new-media based “New Vision”.

Combining works from foreign private collections and Hungarian collections, the exhibition also includes works by Moholy-Nagy’s contemporaries of the avant-garde movement including Sándor Bortnyik, János Mattis-Teutsch, Lajos Tihanyi, Béla Uitz and Kurt Schwitters. In addition, a definitive selection of rare Hungarian and international literary journals which were one of the most important mediums of artistic production during the period will also be on display.

The show includes two contemporary pieces: a digital model of Moholy-Nagy’s pioneering immersive artwork, the Kinetic Constructive System (1922-28), and a contemporary, experimental multi-screen realization of his brilliant film script Dynamics of the Metropolis (1921-1925).

The initiator and curator of the exhibition is the Hungarian-Canadian art historian, Oliver A. I. Botar, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg) and Curator of the Hungarian collection of the Salgo Trust for Education (New York). Dr. Botar has written a monograph to accompany the exhibition.

1014 Budapest, Szent Gyö
rgy tér
2. (Buda Castle)