Y-profile. Young artists from the contemporary collection of the National Bank of Hungary
Generational research identifies millennials born after 1980 and reaching the millennium with the letter Y in the alphabet. The classification system popularised by commercial marketing has taken on the generational mindset of the American social sciences. By necessity, it does not fit neatly into the historical fabric of Hungarian reality. The DuckTales, interrupted by the death of József Antall, is not identical with the experiential plane of the cable channel DuckTales. Yet over the past decade, the Hungarian vernacular has - relatively automatically - adopted the alphabetical notation of the Anglo-Saxon generations. Thus, the term Generation Y for millennials. But just as the y plays a different role in Indo-European Western grammar than in Hungarian spelling, which softens the consonant, so the experience of the Hungarian generation is also changed by the social-historical milieu, for example by the childhood experience of the fall of communism, the trajectory of big politics or the boom and bust of the art market.
Generation Y is blazing its own trail in contemporary Hungarian art. Hungarian millennial artists are digital natives by birth, and as children they were raised in consumer capitalism, surrounded by advertising and products. But with the 2008 global economic crisis, they quickly learned the negative side of market collapse. As an undergraduate (the College of Fine Arts became the University of Fine Arts in 2000), they grew into the contemporary art canon, while discovering international abstract academia for themselves as EU citizens on residency programmes. Over the past decade or more, their sophisticated art has put digital image editing software to work, exploited industrial production logic, turned geometry on its ear and rewritten pop art into gesture. In the meantime, they've been drawn back to nature, and have tapped into the visceral power of instinctive form-making.
Schedule
Since the mid-2010s, representatives of the Hungarian Generation Y have been involved in the global art scene, through websites featuring exhibition designers and Instagram.
Through their online presence and gallery representation, they have achieved unprecedented success in the international art scene, but they have also found a voice with Hungarian art collectors.Millennials have also played an important role in the large-scale contemporary collection launched by the National Bank of Hungary, now in its fifth year of expansion.This exhibition presents a selection of them.Although an institutional collection cannot necessarily give a complete picture of an entire generation, it can reveal typical positions.The curatorial selection on display here uses the works of Generation Y young people in the collection to draw a possible profile of the generation: the Y profile.
About the collection
Now in its fifth year of expansion, the large-scale contemporary collection established by the National Bank of Hungary now includes more than 1,400 works of art.
The MNB's commitment to promoting art is in line with its social responsibility strategy.
An advisory board of eminent experts, including Katalin Keserü, Julia Fabényi, Zsolt Petrányi, Gábor Rieder and Katalin Spengler, has helped to shape the collection, which ranges from post-WWII moderns to the younger generation of the Industrial Plan.The MNB Arts and Culture division, which is responsible for the collection, aims to make the unique material of the collection widely accessible to the public and researchable for the profession, while supporting the international canonisation of Hungarian art.In order to achieve its programme, the division will organise regular exhibitions in Hungary and abroad from 2022, from Veszprém to Miskolc, from Seoul to New York.
The latest in this series is the presentation of the collection's Generation Y artists at the Ludwig Museum.
The exhibition is curated by Gábor Rieder
Participating artists:
BALÁZS Nikolett, BARABÁS Zsófi, BARÁTH Áron, BATYKÓ Róbert, BENKŐ Barnabás, BERNÁTH Dániel, CSATÓ József, DÓRA Ádám, FÁBIÁN Erika, FELSMANN István, FRIDVALSZKI Márk, GÁSPÁR Annamária, GÓTH Martin, HORVÁTH LÓCZI Judit,
KIS RÓKA Csaba, KNYIHÁR Bence, KÓRÓDI Zsuzsanna, KUSOVSZKY Bea, MELKOVICS Tamás, NEMES Márton, Tomasz PIARS, PINTÉR Dia, SZABÓ Menyhért, SZENTGRÓTI Dávid, SZINYOVA Gergő, SZŐKE Gáspár, TIVADAR Andrea, VARGA Ádám, Anthony VASQUEZ
Ludwig Museum
The Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, located in Müpa, is the first museum in Hungary to exclusively collect contemporary art. In addition to a permanent exhibition of the collection donated by the Ludwigs and a number of temporary exhibitions, the museum aims to raise awareness of the works and their creators through special publications and a variety of art education and art education programmes.