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Exhibition

Location: Vigadó Gallery - Exhibition Hall on the 6th Floor

Viola Berki’s Art

A woman once lived and had a dream...

A rabbit’s ear in the moonlight flare,

from a divided bed some bison stare,

dramas in our minds and heads,

all this has been done by Viola’s hands.

László Nagy

Hungarian poet

 

Painter and graphic artist Viola Berki’s lifework is one of the most peculiar and most mysterious legacies of 20th century Hungarian art history. The discovery of her unique artistic expression and form was facilitated by her career at the Szentendre School: her painting style was primarily impacted by the effects of works by Dezső Korniss, Margit Anna and László Balogh. In fact, she is not a follower or a predecessor of any artistic tradition.

Yet, probably this is the very reason why her art can form a common universe with artworks by the most important 20th century artists, thereby creating one single space of these works, characterised by perfect harmony. Viola Berki’s deeply romantic worldview was based on Calvin’s rock and her classical erudition: this worldview was woven from an endless fight between tragically unexploited energies, the world of the Bible, the Antiquity and some murals dating back to the Romanesque Period, the agitated lines of Byzantine drawings, the troubadour literature of the Middle Ages, codex illustrations, the artistic means used by naive and folk arts and the noble fibre of Oriental Arabesque. Organised by Thorma János Museum, this lifework exhibition by Posthumous Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts Viola Berki is on display in Pesti Vigadó from 28th March 2018.

Curators of the exhibition: Zita N. Kovács and Aurél Szakál

Organiser: Thorma János Museum

Supported by: Hungarian Academy of Arts

event-dates
2018.03.28.-2018.05.20.