Contemporary Dependencies. Three Generations of the Hungarian Art Scene

Selected works illustrate the transformation of Hungarian art from the fall of the Iron Curtain to today's post-digital environment. The birth years of individual authors here are not just biographical data, but indicate a different historical experience. This experience influenced the relationship of individual generations to media, technologies, nature, society, images, and their own bodies.

The exhibition is divided into three larger blocks. The first, titled Between Systems, presents the work of authors born in the first half of the 1980s. This “transition generation” spent their childhoods still in the period of 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, i.e., under the conditions of a market society, newly forming gallery operations, and increasing internationalization.

The second block, Inside Transformation, captures the works of authors born in the late 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, i.e., at a time of economic uncertainty, rapid development of social networks, and the associated global sharing of images, information, and visual strategies.

The third part of the exhibition project, Post-Internet, is dedicated to the work of Generation Z authors, i.e., artists born mainly in the second half of the 1990s. For this generation, digital technologies no longer represent a new tool, but a natural living environment. The internet, mobile communication, social networks, video games, and global image databases enter their work as an inherent part of everyday experience. The result is a blurring of the boundaries between physical and virtual, traditional and technological, high and popular art.

The time delimitation of individual parts is indicative. Generational experiences overlap, and some works naturally enter multiple contexts at once. The purpose of the division is not to create three closed groups, but rather to show the gradual transformation of the conditions under which contemporary Hungarian art is created, from the experience of transformation through globalized image sharing to a world in which the digital environment co-determines the very way reality is perceived.

Olomouc Museum of Art has long paid attention to Hungarian fine art. In 2003, it brought the project Distant Closeness / Close Distance, based on the mutual exchange and presentation of 20th-century art collections of the Olomouc Museum of Art and the museum in Székesfehérvár. This cooperation was later followed by the exhibition Crime Scene: Pécsi Műhely, focusing on the conceptual and action work of a group of authors 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.

Exhibition Information

EXHIBITION: Contemporary Dependencies. Three Generations of the Hungarian Art Scene

DATE: 12 11 2026 – 14 03 2027

LOCATION: Olomouc Museum of Art – Museum of Modern Art

AUTHORS: 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

PŘÍPRAVA EXPONÁTŮ: Jakub Barna, Veronika Langer Klimszová, Anna Píšťková, Gabriela Polívková

EDUCATION: David Hrbek, Denisa Tessenyi

PROPAGATION: Tomáš Kasal, Martin Šinkovský, Zdeněk Sodoma