Ground Floor, Prints and Drawings - 25 April 2024 - 15 September 2024
Series, Variations, and Recurring Patterns in Sixteenth- and Twentieth-Century Printmaking
// Open every week from Thursday to Sunday with a permanent exhibition ticket. The exhibition hall of Prints and Drawings is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. //
In our age of global mass production, and amidst the profusion of television series and film franchises, the present exhibition explores the concept of “serial art” in its broader sense in the context of the fine arts. What are the origins of thinking in series, the artistic application of the principle of serialism, seriality as a method, variability, and the practice of repetition in the process of printmaking? How were sequence, variations, the following of models, or indeed, deviation from them, conceived in the graphic art of the Renaissance, and how do such questions relate to art today?
Our exhibition focuses on the two most fascinating periods in terms of this topic. The sixteenth century, which saw the appearance and proliferation of independent series not intended as book illustrations; and the Western art of the second half of the twentieth century, when – with advances in industrial reproduction processes and the dismantling of the unique art object as a status symbol – printmaking adopted a radically new direction and, in many respects, began to diverge from its five-hundred-year history.
Rather than tracing the historical development of print series, the exhibition explores the origins of serial works and the attitudes and methods employed by those who produced them. We present traditional sixteenth-century series, interconnected primarily by their theme, directly alongside serial works by twentieth-century artists that demonstrate, in particular, the variation, combination, and repetition of motives, forms, and rhythms.
The sixteenth century produced many diverse and virtuoso series of prints, among which the most important works on display are by Martin Schongauer, Lucas van Leyden, Albrecht Dürer, Marcantonio Raimondi, Hendrik Goltzius, Jan Harmensz. Muller, Parmigianino and Antonio da Trento. A selection of twentieth-century pieces includes spectacular series by Bridget Riley, Vera Molnar, Dóra Maurer, Max Bill, Kaspar Thomas Lenk, Imi Knoebel, Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tàpies, all of whom have found fascination in the infinite possibilities of variation, the multiplication of gestures, the spontaneous changes that occur during repetition, and the succession of phases.
The selection includes both complete and partial series, highlighting how, while series can most often be regarded as visual and thematic units, in certain cases the individual prints that compose them can also function as independent images. The show features works from the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, which contains a rich diversity of print series from the sixteenth century right up to contemporary works of art.
Curators: Kinga Bódi and Eszter Kardos, art historians
