Museum of Fine Art Brings Sculpture to the Budapest City Boating Lake

Written by Mónika Geskó Saturday, 31 December 2011 21:40

Budapest.- The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest presents "Art on Lake" at the Budapest City Boating Lake from May 24th until September 4th. The summer exhibition on the City Park Boating Lake titled "Art on Lake" promises to be one of the most exciting artistic productions of the year. Over a period of three months the public will have the opportunity to see sculptures, most of which were especially made for this occasion by 25 noted artists from 14 EU countries at an exhibition organised by the Museum of Fine Arts set in this unusual venue.

The contemporary exhibition of fine arts, which is the result of three years of work, is one of the most important and spectacular domestic cultural events of Hungary’s EU rotating presidency. The City Park Boating Lake was the venue for a similar production ten years ago, when works by Hungarian artists were on display to the public for one and a half months. The present exhibition follows in the wake of the earlier production but this one has been organised by the Museum of Fine Arts and realised as a larger-scale international project at a location renovated with the help of European Union funding. The Museum of Fine Arts occasionally undertakes the organisation of exhibitions displaying contemporary art, even though it primarily preserves and exhibits classical fine art. However, the organisation of a large-scale international show constitutes an unusual event in the history of the institution. This rare opportunity for the museum to step outside of its own walls is attributable to the attention paid to the institution by those interested in the fine arts in Hungary and perhaps throughout the whole of Europe. Instead of taking place in a closed exhibition hall, the show will be set on an open-air lake in the heart of the city displaying works by Belgian, Czech, Finnish, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Russian, Austrian, Romanian, Spanish, Slovakian and Hungarian artists that no one single museum in the world could put on.


The exhibition, set on 35 thousand square metres of water situated in perhaps the most attractive part of the Hungarian capital, will definitely not escape the attention of tourists visiting here, who will have the opportunity to observe how twenty-five artists respond to the world around us. In their work many of the artists have sought answers to what are perhaps the most pressing problems of our times: Róza El-Hassan’s exclamation mark made together with basket weavers, Tea Makipaa’s Atlantis, Daniel Knorr’s concrete snowman and Jíri David’s enormous stick for the blind present us with the serious and insurmountable problems that we are beset with at the start of the century. The museum and the board of trustees it called upon – Péter Fitz, the director of the Municipal Picture Gallery, Krisztina Jerger, art historian and exhibition organiser, as well as Dr. Alexander Tolnay, an independent curator – have selected the exhibiting artists over the last three years. Invited artists: French artists Anne and Patrick Poirier, Spanish artists Susana Solano and Jaume Plensa, German artists Günther Uecker, Via Lewandowsky and Willi Weiner, Romanian artist Daniel Knorr, Czech artists Krištof Kintera and Jirí David, Slovak artist Erik Binder, English artist Heather Allen, Finnish artists Tea Makipaa and Halldor Ulfarsson, Dutch artists Laurens Kolks and Paul Segers, Austrian artists Brigitte Kowanz and Joseph Bernhardt, Italian artist Mimmo Roselli, Polish artists Magdalena Abakanowicz and Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Belgian artist Gert Robijns, and Hungarian artists Róza El-Hassan, Zénó Kelemen, Ilona Nemeth and Balázs Kicsiny.

This exhibition allows the museum to leave its own walls and to exhibit works of art by the outstanding artists listed above in the most open venue possible, in a special public space, on a lake. There will be neither walls, nor fences and people will be able to see the exhibition from the bridge and walkways of the City Park; for several months every day from 10 a.m. until it gets dark the show can be seen up close by boating on the lake.


The Museum of Fine Arts is located in Heroes' Square, Budapest, facing the Palace of Art. It was built from plans by Albert Schickedanz and Fülöp Herzog in an eclectic-neoclassical style, between 1900 and 1906. The museum's collection is made up of international art (other than Hungarian), including all periods of European art, and comprises more than 100,000 pieces. The collection is made up of various older additions such as those from Buda Castle, the Esterházy and Zichy estates, as well as donations from individual collectors. The Museum's collection is made up of six departments: Egyptian, Antique, Old sculpture gallery, Old painter gallery, Modern collection, Graphics collection. The institution celebrated its centenary in 2006. The museum holds one of the largest collection of Egyptian art in Europe and a significant collection of works from Ancient Greece and Rome. The 3,000 paintings in the collection offer an almost uninterrupted survey of the development of European painting from the 13th to the late 18th centuries. The core of the collection is constituted by the 700 paintings acquired from the Esterhazy estate. The collection is split up into Italian, German, Netherlandish, Flemish, French, English and Spanish art. The most important works include Maso di Banco's Coronation of the Virgin, Sassetta's Saint Thomas Aquinas at Prayer, Domenico Ghirlandaio's Saint Stephen Martyr, Gentile Bellini's Portrait of Caterina Cornaro, Giorgione's Portrait of a Young Man, Raphael's 'Esterhazy Madonna', Correggio's Madonna and Child with an Angel, three masterpieces by Sebastiano del Piombo, Bronzino's Adoration of the Shepherds as well as his Venus, Cupid and Jealousy, Titian's Portrait of Doge Marcantonio Trevisani, Tintoretto's Supper at Emmaus, Tiepolo's St James the Greater in the Battle of Clavijo, Dürer's Portrait of a Young Man, Bernard van Orley's Portrait of Emperor Charles V, eight pictures by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's St John the Baptist Preaching, Rubens's Mucius Scaevola Before Porsenna, two excellent portraits by Frans Hals, and a particularly strong collection of works by Spanish masters including El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.szepmuveszeti.hu

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