SAGE Paris presents, in collaboration with the acb gallery of Budpest, the artworks of the Hungarian Avant-Garde group known as Pécs workshop active between 1968 and 1980, composed of Ferenc Ficzek, Károly Halász, Károly Kismányoky, Sándor Pinczehelyi and Kálmán Szíjártó.
The artworks of the artists of the Pécs workshop are set within the multitudes of progressive and experimental artworks –being individual or collective- which flourished then behind the Iron Curtain despite the aesthetic censorship. Regardless of the fact that the biopolitical situation of the group had been peripheral – in the province of a small country isolated among the Eastern communist countries -, its production affirms the artistic survival instinct and the validity of the regional and international synchronicity, dear to Carl Gustav Jung. The artists were working despite an absence of local art market. The interdisciplinary nature of their artistic practice was not moving in direction of what was trendy, but in consideration of new strategies and aesthetic and ethical stances firmly held in order to offset the anxiety and the permanent distrust which was surrounding them. The work of the group, the mutual inspiration and influence that the artists were exercising on one another and the fertile intellectual atmosphere of the workshop was certainly not a unique exemple, but its intensity was indeed examplary.
The Hungarian avant-garde 1968-1980
May 25th – July 28th, 2018
SAGE Paris
1 bis avenue de Lowendal
1 bis avenue de Lowendal
75007 Paris
