Contemporary Dependencies. Young Hungarian Artists / The Balázs Szluka Collection

The transformation of Hungarian art from the fall of the Iron Curtain to today’s post-digital environment is illustrated through selected works. The birth years of individual artists are not merely biographical data here, but point to different historical experiences. These experiences shaped each generation’s relationship to media, technology, nature, society, the image and the body itself.

The exhibition is divided into three larger sections. The first, titled Between Systems, presents the work of artists born in the first half of the 1980s. This “generation of transition” spent its childhood still under late state socialism, but came of age during the political and economic transformation of the 1990s. They entered the art scene around the turn of the millennium, in the conditions of a market society, a newly forming gallery system and advancing internationalisation.

The second section, Within Transformation, brings together works by artists born at the end of the 1980s. This is a generation shaped by the market economy, advertising, popular culture, the internet and European integration. Its members entered the art scene around 2010, at a time of economic uncertainty, rapid growth of social networks and the global sharing of images, information and visual strategies connected with them.

The third part of the project, After the Internet, is devoted to the work of Generation Z artists, namely those born mostly in the second half of the 1990s. For this generation, digital technologies are no longer a new tool but a natural living environment. The internet, mobile communication, social networks, video games and global image databases enter their work as a self-evident part of everyday experience. The result is a blurring of boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the traditional and the technological, high and popular art.

The time frames of the individual sections are approximate. Generational experiences overlap, and some works naturally belong to several contexts at once. The purpose of this division is not to create three closed groups, but rather to show the gradual change in the conditions under which contemporary Hungarian art is made: from the experience of transformation, through the globalised sharing of images, to a world in which the digital environment co-determines the very way we perceive reality.

Muzeum umění Olomouc has long paid attention to Hungarian visual art. In 2003 it presented the project Distant Closeness / Close Distance, based on the mutual exchange and presentation of 20th-century art collections of Muzeum umění Olomouc and the museum in Székesfehérvár. This cooperation was later followed by the exhibition The Scene of the Crime: Pécsi Műhely, focused on the conceptual and action-based work of a group of artists active in Pécs from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The exhibition Contemporary Dependencies continues this line from a different angle: not as a historical probe, but as a generational study of contemporary Hungarian visual culture.

Information about the exhibition

EXHIBITION: Contemporary Dependencies. Young Hungarian Artists / The Balázs Szluka Collection

DATES: 12 11 2026 – 14 03 2027

VENUE: Muzeum umění Olomouc – Museum of Modern Art

ARTISTS: Štěpánka Bieleszová, Balázs Szluka, Sándor Pinczehelyi

Architectural design: Štěpánka Bieleszová

TEXTS: Štěpánka Bieleszová

GRAPHIC DESIGN: Kateřina Manková

LANGUAGE EDITING AND TRANSLATIONS: Zuzana Henešová, Ester Honti

INSTALLATION: Vlastimil Sedláček, Filip Šindelář, Radka Žáková

EXHIBITS PREPARATION: Jakub Barna, Veronika Langer Klimszová, Anna Píšťková, Gabriela Polívková

EDUCATION: David Hrbek, Denisa Tessenyi

PROMOTION: Tomáš Kasal, Martin Šinkovský, Zdeněk Sodoma