The MNB Arts and Culture, the division of the Hungarian National Bank that manages the contemporary art collection, opened an exhibition of works by female artists from the collection, entitled Liquid Slices of Time , on 15 April at the Dubniczay Palace in Veszprém, in conjunction with the Veszprém-Balaton 2023 - European Capital of Culture event series. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Orsolya Vető's Lia series of the same title.
The exhibition is site-specific in its theme, as Veszprém is traditionally referred to as the city of the queens, due to the historical connection of the beatified Queen Gizella. Perhaps for this reason, the Veszprém-Balaton 2023 project pays special attention to female artists. This effort also coincides with MNB Arts and Culture's objectives, and we are proud that the MNB collection currently includes 23 female and 48 male artists, which means that one third of its artists are women. This rate is high compared to statistics from Western institutions and the global art world, citing, for example, a 2019 study of ten years of North American museum data by In Other Words in collaboration with artnet News, which found that only 14% of exhibitions had female participation. (The term 'female artist' is therefore not the same as the term 'woman artist': the former means that the creator of the work of art is a woman, and the latter refers to an artist who deals with women's issues and is inspired by the experience of being a woman.)
The MNB collection, which is the material for the exhibition, is a contemporary art collection of around 1,200 pieces, mostly paintings, but also glass, textiles, installation and other mixed media works. The core of the collection is made up of works by the so-called neo-avant-garde generation of artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s with experimental aspirations and have since become world-famous. The other strong pillar of the collection is the work of the youngest generation.
The exhibition "Liquid Slices of Time " aims to show this duality and sometimes a kind of continuity through the works of female artists. The selection is based on specific connections: sometimes it is a question of an artist-student relationship (as in the case of Ilona Keserü and Zsófi Barabás), sometimes a young artist refers to an older master (for example in Judit Horváth Lóczi's Hommage á Vera Molnár), or the link is looser, whether it is collage as a working method (in the works of Margit Szilvitzky, Rita Koszorús and Eszter Anna Tóth).
Exhibiting artists: Zsófi Barabás, Erika Fábián, Judit Horváth Lóczi, Ilona Keserü, Zsuzsanna Kóródi, Rita Koszorús, Bea Kusovszky, Dóra Maurer, Vera Molnár, Katja Pál, Gizella Rákóczy, Judit Reigl, Margit Szilvitzky, Eszter Anna Tóth, Lia Orsolya Vető
Curator: Kinga Hamvai, art historian, Head of the MNB's Contemporary Collection Division
