Artists

Victor Vasarely

Press release

The large-scale retrospective to mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Victor Vasarely offers an exhaustive overview of an oeuvre that set in motion one of the most far-reaching revolutions in twentieth-century visual thinking. The work of Victor Vasarely played a defining role in the emergence of geometrical abstraction and Op art following the Second World War, and continues to inform attitudes to visual culture to this day. The exhibition traces Vasarely’s principal creative periods in chronological order, from his early, figurative experiments, through the pure systems of geometrical abstraction, to the meticulous visual structuring of optical phenomena. The exhibited works illustrate a coherently constructed thought process, in which the relationship of form, colour, and motion appears not merely as a matter of aesthetics but as an essential element in the modern visual idiom. Visitors will be given an insight into how Vasarely strove to liberate art from the traditional constraints of the studio, allowing it to shape the everyday environment of architectural and urban spaces. The last Vasarely retrospective in Hungary on a similarly large scale took place in the Budapest Kunsthalle almost sixty years ago, in 1969; now, decades later, art lovers can once again enjoy a comprehensive overview of his oeuvre. The exhibition draws primarily on the Budapest collection established by the artist, which is the biggest and most comprehensive public collection of Vasarely’s work in the world. It also features outstanding works from the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence that have never before been shown in Hungary. In addition, this anniversary exhibition includes works from the Vasarely Museum in Pécs and from private collections. The more than 140 works, arranged in five sections, are accompanied by documents and previously unknown photographs and videos that chart Vasarely’s oeuvre with a completeness unprecedented in Hungarian exhibition history. Exhibition curators: Veronika Pócs, Vasarely Museum, Budapest Mónika Zombori, Department of Art after 1800, Museum of Fine Arts „In the future, only abstractions will fit between the stars and the atoms. Across the vast landscapes of physics, poetry springs forth.” – Victor Vasarely, Plasti-Cité. L'oeuvre plastique dans votre vie quotidienne, 1970