Art on Lake

The City Park Boating Lake was the venue for a similar production ten years ago, when works by Hungarian artists were on display to the public for one and a half months. The present exhibition follows in the wake of the earlier production but this one has been organised by the Museum of Fine Arts and realised as a larger-scale international project at a location renovated with the help of European Union funding.
The Museum of Fine Arts occasionally undertakes the organisation of exhibitions displaying contemporary art, even though it primarily preserves and exhibits classical fine art. However, the organisation of a large-scale international show constitutes an unusual event in the history of the institution. This rare opportunity for the museum to step outside of its own walls is attributable to the attention paid to the institution by those interested in the fine arts in Hungary and perhaps throughout the whole of Europe. Instead of taking place in a closed exhibition hall, the show will be set on an open-air lake in the heart of the city displaying works by Belgian, Czech, Finnish, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Russian, Austrian, Romanian, Spanish, Slovakian and Hungarian artists that no one single museum in the world could put on.

This exhibition allows the museum to leave its own walls and to exhibit works of art by the outstanding artists listed above in the most open venue possible, in a special public space, on a lake. There will be neither walls, nor fences and people will be able to see the exhibition from the bridge and walkways of the City Park; for several months every day from 10 a.m. until it gets dark the show can be seen up close by boating on the lake. The exhibition and the exhibiting artists are also featured in the second part of the recently published Art on Lake magazine, of which 6,000 issues have been printed in both Hungarian and English.The exhibition, set on 35 thousand square metres of water situated in perhaps the most attractive part of the Hungarian capital, will definitely not escape the attention of tourists visiting here, who will have the opportunity to observe how twenty-five artists respond to the world around us. In their work many of the artists have sought answers to what are perhaps the most pressing problems of our times: Róza El-Hassan’s exclamation mark made together with basket weavers, Tea Makipaa’s Atlantis, Daniel Knorr’s concrete snowman and Jíři David’s enormous stick for the blind present us with the serious and insurmountable problems that we are beset with at the start of the century. The museum and the board of trustees it called upon – Péter Fitz, the director of the Municipal Picture Gallery, Krisztina Jerger, art historian and exhibition organiser, as well as Dr. Alexander Tolnay, an independent curator – have selected the exhibiting artists over the last three years.
Invited artists: French artists Anne and Patrick POIRIER, Spanish artists Susana SOLANO and Jaume PLENSA, German artists Günther UECKER, Via LEWANDOWSKY and Willi WEINER, Romanian artist Daniel KNORR, Czech artists Krištof KINTERA and Jiří DAVID, Slovak artist Erik BINDER, English artist Heather ALLEN, Finnish artists Tea MÄKIPÄÄ and Halldor ULFARSSON, Dutch artists Laurens KOLKS and Paul SEGERS, Austrian artists Brigitte KOWANZ and Joseph BERNHARDT, Italian artist Mimmo ROSELLI, Polish artists Magdalena ABAKANOWICZ and Krzysztof M. BEDNARSKI, Belgian artist Gert ROBIJNS, and Hungarian artists Róza EL-HASSAN, Zénó KELEMEN, Ilona NÉMETH and Balázs KICSINY.

More cultural events of the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the  European Union