Exhibition

Description:

The exhibition presents the life reform movements, which flourished in Central European countries from the last third of the 19th century onwards, and their impact on contemporary art. The term ‘Lebensreform, life-style reform’ is an international summarizing term for the modernisation-critical movements that flourished during the ‘fin de siècle’ period, which shared a common characteristic about to return to nature, self-healing and a search for lost cosmic wholeness and spirituality. These movements (garden city movement, land reform, anti-alcoholism, vegetarianism, naturopathy, body culture and the various new religious, social reform and artistic endeavours associated with them) form a diverse, often contesting, ensemble of movements that harmonise the relationship between man and nature, man and work, man and God under the civilisation-critical slogan of ‘escaping from the city’.

Young writers, artists, composers, philosophers, natural and social scientists, and prominent representatives of the new intellectuals who appeared in the big cities of the Monarchy – Vienna, Prague and Budapest – were often followers of the movements, even propagators of the self-reform movements of the time, vegetarianism, naturopathy, the body culture movement and the various esoteric and gnostic salvation doctrines and social utopias associated with them. In this context, and in addition to presenting the various movements of ‘Lebensreform’, the exhibition also looks at the ‘hidden’ and hitherto partly unexplored links to the artists of the period and to the life reform movements: their active role in the various communities and intellectual, religious, spiritual and social reform movements, and the influence of these movements on their works, their way of life and their understanding of the world. The Kunsthalle exhibition reveals stories hitherto hidden from the Hungarian public.

To read more about the exhibition, please visit the websites:

• In English
• In Hungarian

Project:

Description:

Art education and talent management is now present in almost all museums: it helps to make sense of each exhibition for a wider range of age groups. The Labor, a joint initiative of the Kunsthalle and the ELTE Doctoral School of Education’s Theory and History of Theory programme, is a project space that seeks different methods and formulates its own questions in a different way. More precisely and above all, it asks questions. Young people working in the Lab explore their own problems in the dense and expressive environment of the artworks, and are engaged by the questions of the artists and mentors.

For more information, please visit the websites:

• In English
• In Hungarian