Many important cultural events will take place in EU member states to accompany the Czech presidency of the EU in 2009. Among the most remarkable of them will be an exhibition of the very best of the lifetime work of Alphonse Mucha at the Museum of Fine Arts during the Budapest Spring Festival. The exhibition, prepared by curators Marta Sylvestrová of the Moravian Gallery in Brno and Petr Štembera of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, will introduce and analyze the best of the posters, paintings, drawings and photographs from the artist’s Parisian, American and Czech periods and will highlight the inspiration and creativity Mucha found in the motif of women in much of his art.

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STORY TOLD IN IMAGES
The exhibition of the year’s best press photos is a renewed encounter with the events, faces and moods that made the year 2008 memorable. Moments of drama and joy, struggles, celebration and mourning, everyday life situations and never to be repeated artistic and sports achievements and natural wonders.
September 11, 1989: Hungary’s western border is opened to the East German refugees. This was a pivotal event not only for Hungary but also for the future of Europe. The exhibition on the 20th Anniversary of the Opening of the Border is a journey back in time thanks to familiar and previously unseen photographs and documents.

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Selection from the pearls of Czech literature. Besides works of outstanding Czechs in world literature, the exhibition in the National Széchényi Library also presents a selection of works by the young generation of writers. A memorial exhibition on Hrabal, images of Kafka’s Prague, works of graphic art and film screenings add further interest.

Curator of the exhibition: Gábor Pogány art historian

Our exhibition presents “Play Art” where humour and art come together. Here the essence of play is to show things in a different light, to enchant, to cock a snook, to separate phenomena from the concrete spectacle, to draw attention to what lies behind things. In this spirit the invited artists express their opinions about their everyday reality in their own individual artistic language. The essence lies in the openness of childhood preserved in art, the capacity to marvel at phenomena, the spontaneous, sincere response that shows the often absurd happenings of life in their reality.

In a remote corner of Hungary an internationally known and recognised creative camp has been operating for around fifteen years. For two weeks every summer the artists create simultaneously, for all to see, inspired by each other, together or separately but certainly observing each other and absorbing the influences. They are inspired by the Hungarian landscape and the atmosphere of the artists’ camp, they are open to the art of others and offer their own for reception. So far 130 artists from 20 countries have met here, and on each occasion have created works resulting from the unique occasion and mutual influence. They take the mutual inspiration away with themselves as a gift, enriched in spirit, forms of expression and themes, incorporating what they have experienced into their own art.
György Csuta (1952), painter, the “spiritus rector” of the Békés artists’ camp, is at home in graphic art, watercolours and oils and also likes to experiment with the restructuring of techniques. As a good organiser and community-spirited person, he has visited many artists’ camps abroad – as an organiser and participant (Trofaiach, St.Anton, Klagenfurt, Wörschach/Austria, Reinosa/Spain, Biela/Italy), and has also played a part in other artists’ camps in Hungary: Nagykanizsa, Gyomaendrőd, Hajós.

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The Budapest Museum of Applied Arts evokes the figure of Haydn, who also composed a melody for musical clocks, through the material culture of his age, among others with the characteristic clock types of distinctive shape and structure.

Haydn’s career spanned a very wide space and time; he travelled to many countries of Europe, visiting places from simply country homes to the most splendid royal courts. The long period extending from his birth to his death – with artistic styles ranging from Rococo, to neo-Classicism and Empire – is also known as the Age of Enlightenment.

The exhibition invites visitors on an imaginary journey to the 18th century, an age of inventions and discoveries. Besides the Encyclopaedia edited by Diderot that summed up the world picture of the time, many treasures selected from the museum’s collection evoke the period. An emblematic object of the century was the clock combining several different genres: it is a complex masterpiece in itself and as an instrument for measuring time is also a philosophical concept. The many different types presented in the exhibition – including a number of rarities – are arranged in territorial groups. Linked to the exhibition is a selection of exclusive contemporary timepieces from the collection of the IWC company of Schaffhausen titled “Luxury watches from Switzerland”.

A series of music programmes will accompany the visual experience of the applied art masterpieces. Visitors to the exhibition can enjoy chamber concerts of music by Haydn and his contemporaries.

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The exhibition of works by children between 4–18 years of age aims to give a full picture of their creative attitudes and the pedagogical work done in the GYÍK studio.
“Those who attend the studio, whether children or teachers, all see the world in the same way, with a creative eye and active approach. They do not hesitate, they do not have inhibitions or prejudices. They create and produce something with anything. But they do not produce just anything. They recreate the image of the world, again and again, from year to year, in groups and individually. Children have been attending the studio in the Hungarian National Gallery for 33 years now to observe both the constancy of the world and its changes, to express their thoughts and feelings in paintings, sculpture, clay and other media, to show to their parents, adult society, or simply themselves.
The children who attend the studio are not exceptional beings, they are not more talented or clever than their fellows, perhaps they are a little more relaxed (liberated?), bold and enterprising.
The GYIK Studio (Children’s and Youth Art Studio) is a tiny island of freedom and independent thinking. It is good to be shipwrecked there.” (István Sinkó painter, director of the studio)

Ioan Nemtoi started the “Who’s afraid of glass?” series of glass installations in Potenza in December 2006, he reinterpreted the concept in a spectacular outdoor exhibition for Museums Quartier in Vienna in May 2007, to bring it again to Italy at the Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa in September 2007. Now he continues this periplus and came to the attention of his art lovers with a spectacular exhibition for Budapest Spring Festival.

“Who’s afraid of Glass?” is an inspiring world of color, shape and texture. Nemtoi’s three-dimensional structures are united by an ideal expression of proportions and symmetry. Set somewhere between doubt and revelation, doom and redemption, the work has a reflective quality of someone endlessly questioning him/herself. With a fascination for the interplay of opaque and transparent surfaces, and the reality – captured in the work’s reflective quality - Nemtoi brings together the special relationship between shape, color and meaning.

"Ioan Nemtoi's glass installation "Who's afraid of Glass?" initiates a dialog in the universal language of color and shape, referring to its own history and artistic discourse. The vivid pure red and the organic shape make a powerful contrast with the urban spatial context. Glass has been a medium mainly used until recently for the expression of decorative arts. It is a genre that begins to run its course, at the same time searching for its own identity. Nemtoi challenges glass and provokes us by using it as a manifest, playing with it and bringing it to the frontier between the conceptual and the decorative. "Who's afraid of Glass?" has the appearance of a squirming fantasy, a giant insect with thousands of tentacles, but affirms itself as Nemtoi's personal reinterpretation of the primordial elements, of water and fire, his artistic statement." Marilena Oprescu, curator.

“I am in love with glass, this utterly intriguing substance that oscillates between fragility and endurance in time, between the liquid and the solid state. Starting with its versatility, the matter itself can be a pretext for endless debates. As an artist, I use it to express myself; I’m exploring its multiple aspects and trying to push its limits, technical and conceptual, hoping that the outcome will be for the visitor as enriching and exciting at the same time, as the whole process of creating was for me. “ says Ioan Nemţoi, glass artist.

In the space of a few years in the late 1960s Edward Saidi Tingatinga (1932–72), then an unknown innovative artist, launched the style of Tanzanian painting and a creative community that has since become world famous.
The exhibition presents paintings selected by KIKOA Art and the Compass Communication Company Ltd., brought to Hungary from the place where the style was born: the Morogoro Store district of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. It was here that Tingatinga and his first group began to work, and it is also here that the Tingatinga Art Cooperative Society has its central building, where the painters work in a community studio.
The Tingatinga paintings grasp the duality of the stories they convey: the power and fragility of nature, the simplicity and mysticism of everyday life, the energetic beauty and contradictions of the Tanzanian environment. The intensive colour effect is produced by the mixed bicycle paints that have always been used, applied in several layers in clear and vibrant colours.

The exhibition organised in the frame of intercultural dialogue promises to add a special touch of colour to the Festival programme, considering that over the centuries the coexistence of several ethnic groups has made artistic life in Transylvania an inclusive culture. The 20-year-old Vármegye Gallery of the Foundation for the Art of Transylvania aims to present cultural diversity, new artistic aspirations outside Hungary within the frame of the Budapest Spring Festival.

Curator of the exhibition: Mónika Csernitcky art historian

An exhibition in the Makett Labor with the support of the Spring Festival where everyone can exhibit their favourite indoor plant!
Everyone is asked to bring a photograph that we will place beside your favourite.
Urban Glasshouses is a research project focussing on an urban phenomenon that we discovered as we walked around Budapest and judged worth recording. We found a large number of shop windows that have lost their original function and, for want of anything better, have been transformed into homes for indoor plants.
Looking behind the windows we find individual motivations, personal stories and memories. Besides their aesthetic function, the plants have their own stories.
A map will be made of the glasshouses in the city, so that anyone can go and admire the unusual windows shown in the exhibition in the form of photos.

This experiment in which we seek an answer to how school children see the environment in which they live could perhaps be regarded as a kind of sociological survey. Thinking back to our own childhood we find that there are only a few “outside” locations in our earliest memories, usually the house and kindergarten. The rest of space is filled with visual memories during the school years. It will also be interesting to observe what catches children’s imagination.

Curator of the exhibition: Gábor Pogány art historian

Erik Binder who lives in Bratislava paints in the style of the skateboard subculture and graffiti, dribbling paint on cardboard, raising a manifestation in a peripheral situation to the level of high art. The internationally known artist also directs activities for children, aiming at spontaneous object-making creativity.
András A. Király is also interested in public art and street art but his works are wall paintings on a very big scale competing with giant posters, and floor decorations. He had two ideas for the exhibition. One is a carpet motif to be created for the inner court of the residential building in which the Inda Gallery is located (to remain in place after the exhibition), the other is a wall painting on the firewall of a playground that can be seen from the window of the gallery. As a third work he is producing a series of drawings of contemporary objects in the style of archaeological drawings. The children coming to visit the exhibition can learn the method used for these drawings.
Zsófi Szemző graduated from the video department of MOME in 2008. For the exhibition she is planning a location-specific work comprising a wall tile picture and a series of watercolours that together tell personal stories.
During the exhibition the artists will hold sessions for children where the participants can create their own works that will be exhibited in the gallery. The carpet pattern to be created in the courtyard will also provide a pattern for children that they can colour like a colouring book. In this way the exhibition will be continuously expanded with the children’s drawings.

The Nessim Gallery offers the Budapest public a real curiosity with its exhibition during the Budapest Spring Festival of works by Ivo Přeček (1935–2006), a leading figure of Czech neo-avantgarde photography.
Together with a friend, the artist from Olomouc founded the famous DOFO group and throughout his life always had a very autonomous approach to photography. The exhibition in the Nessim Gallery, organised in co-operation with the Muzeum Umění Olomouc, focuses on the conceptual works Ivo Přeček produced in the 1960s and 1970s.
The conceptual photograph has a strong presence in Czech photography as a trend and Ivo Přeček is a very characteristic figure of that trend as a thinker.
Curators of the exhibition: Štěpánka Bieleszova, Mihály Surányi

The choice of theme arises from the anniversary. The interpretation by artists of what happened 20 years ago and in the period since then promises to be a special experience as both young and older artists will participate. Artists who were still young children at the time of the change of system and others who were young adults in 1989. Many contemporary artists respond sensitively to events happening around them, giving a distinctive impression of recent Hungarian history. It will be exciting to see how the artists respond to the happenings of the last 20 years and how they evaluate the events of 20 years ago.

The exhibition will feature photographs by six contemporary artists, three Hungarians – Balázs Czeizel, Jenő Detvay, Géza László Mészáros – and three Poles – Anita Andrzejewska, Agnieszka Kaminska, Jowita Bogna Mormul – in a selection by the Bolt Photo Gallery. Their images are linked by the mysterious representation of everyday objects. Sentimental, vague, gossamer-light mysterious prints.
Viewers will have to decode them for themselves.

In December 1909 a new art association known as Művészház (House of Art) was formed in Budapest. During its short existence, it organised a series of highly important exhibitions on the work of outstanding Hungarian and international representatives of modern art.
The activity and significance of Művészház are still little known. The Exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery explores the operation of this institution that played a key role in the emergence and recognition of modern art. Most of these works are now in private collections and foreign museums. The exhibition’s aim is to assemble as many of them as possible to give a picture of the Művészház.
The exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery presents a selection of works by the major artists of the period including József Rippl-Rónai, János Vaszary, Károly Kernstok, Mihály Munkácsy, Pál Szinyei Merse, József Egry, Béla Kádár, János Kmetty and József Nemes Lampérth.

Gloves are a very important item of clothing for northern peoples. The oldest surviving gloves in Estonia date from the 14th century. Magic protective power was attributed to the knitted patterns on the gloves, so Estonians tucked a pair into their belt even on the hottest summer days. Gloves played an important part in marriage and burial ceremonies and could also be used to cure illnesses. They give warmth in the winter cold, but perhaps the belief of our ancestors that their patterns protect us from evil still lives.
The exhibition of the Estonian National Museum, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, is brought to Hungary by the Estonian Institute.

The MUSAC collection in the Spanish city of Leon is one of Europe’s most exciting collections of 21st century international contemporary art. The major exhibition we are holding this spring is drawn from this material and deals with the extremes of life. The giant exhibition of close to 100 works by 36 artists from all parts of the world explores the connection between life and art.

What we see is related to how we live. And this is the key to understanding art. The works filling the entire Kunsthalle: drawings, paintings, wall paintings, films, photos, videos and installations oppose two artistic approaches that place the emphasis on the sensual or the intellectual aspects of everyday life. Heaven and hell – the cream of contemporary art through Mediterranean eyes.

Curators: Dr. Zsolt Petrányi, Augustin Pérez Rubio

The focus is on children’s creative imagination rather than on the artist.
In recent years the National Theatre History Museum and Institute has held drawing competitions for Budapest children as a major element in its museum educational activity. The themes were either linked to current exhibitions or reflect notable theatre events.

Theatre photography originally served documentary purposes but has become a separate branch of art. Specifically theatre images that have been undeservedly relegated to the fringes of museum interest also reflect the photographer’s view of the theatre, the atmosphere of the performance and the theatre culture of a given community.
Kronbauer’s photographs, reflecting his own individual way of seeing things, are thus not “only” theatrical and not “only” photographic revelations: they are unique works of art – many of them still unknown to the great majority of specialists – evoking foreign theatre moments.
The professional discussions and the museum pedagogical sessions being held in conjunction with the exhibition are intended mainly to raise the basic issues of contemporary theatre photography so that the exhibition can “speak” to the widest possible age groups and social groups.

Bohuslav Martinů, (1890–1959) Czech composer and violinist, is one of the major figures of 20th century Czech music. The images and multimedia materials of the chamber exhibition arranged to mark the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death have been made available by the Martinů Institute of Prague.

Curator: Sandra Bergmannová

In the 90's, the theme of the body and sensuality occupied a major place in Czech photography and while it remains important, it is no longer so fundamental and frequent since it has been largely supplanted by the theme of identity. This theme appears to be particularly attractive for those women photographers who often seek and examine their own identity and its changes in a self-reflective way, or who are also interested in the many roles of modern women in their relationship towards men, children and society, emancipation and gender differences. The exhibition presents the theme of identity through the work of leading female representatives of the youngest generation of Czech and Slovak photographers. Although women’s sensibility and approach is in some way reflected in their work, they cannot all be regarded as characteristic manifestations of women’s art or even of feminism.

This event, attracting a wide audience, is a performance lasting several hours during which sculptures are created underwater in a giant pool. The audience can follow the underwater events that will be recorded on a camera and projected on a giant screen.

Wax will be melted in big vats, then poured slowly into a pool by two assistants. The sculptor will shape the material underwater. The finished, solidified sculptures will be raised carefully from the pool and displayed on the day of the event in the nearby MOM Park.