Technology-based art in twentieth century and contemporary visual culture

The exhibition not only focuses on the use of light in art, but also presents, without claiming to be exhaustive, initiatives in which the relationship between art and science is expressed through the innovative use of non-traditional media.

Technology-based art in twentieth century and contemporary visual culture:

Imre Bukta

Attila Csáji

Tihamér Gyarmathy

György Gerő

Antal Kelle

György Kepes

Klára Kuchta

Mattis-Teutsch Waldemar

László Moholy-Nagy

Vera Molnár

Hajnal Németh

Nicolas Schöffer

István Orosz

Károly Szelényi

Gábor Csongor Szigeti

Tamás Szvet

"This century belongs to the light!" - said László Moholy-Nagy in 1927, a decade after he wrote his poem "Vision of Light". Who wouldn't agree with this prophetic statement at the beginning of the 21st century, seeing that artificially produced light has become an indispensable part of our everyday life?

There are few areas in the history of universal art whose development has not been so significantly influenced by a few important artists of Hungarian origin. The works in the exhibition trace the historical arc of the tradition, the intellectual and cultural heritage that emerged from the initiative of Hungarian artists who created the "master key" of technology-based art to elevate light-based visuality to an autonomous art form.

György Kepes and László Moholy-Nagy were among the first in the history of twentieth-century art to address the communal role of light and the urban function of light art as both practising artists and theorists. Moholy designed the Light-Space Modulator (1922-1930), considered an iconic work of kinetic art, and Kepes erected the first public neon work (1949-1950). The artists of the next two generations presented in the exhibition drew on their intellectual heritage to discover new possibilities for expressing themselves through the language of the medium. Among them, Vera Molnár, who was one of the first to use a computer to create drawings and paintings, and who was one of the first to use a computer in the birth of digital art, stands out. She was co-founder of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV), a Paris-based group founded in 1960, and Attila Csáji, who founded the FOTON-ART group in Budapest in 1977, and who pioneered the study of the artistic aspects of the new light source, the laser, discovered at the time, both in Hungary and in the United States as a fellow at the MIT Visual Research Center.

It is symbolic of the theme and the location that one of the first ideas in the history of the European avant-garde to link art and technology, the book Problems of Light in Fine Art, was jointly drafted and published in 1925 by the Hungarian sculptor Miklós Barna and the Romanian painter Arthur Segal. It was thanks to his aesthetics, and those of a similar period, which explored new forms of optical culture, that a group of artists consciously turned their backs on pigment-based painting and began to spearhead a direct approach to light, opening the way for the emergence of intermediate genres on which not only contemporary media art but also, in a sense, the digital culture that pervades our everyday lives is based.

The exhibition is organised by the Hungarian Academy of Arts and the Kepes Institute in Eger.