Essentia Artis 2026

The Essentia Artis interdisciplinary exhibition and programme series, held every spring since 2023, will ceremoniously reopen on 27 February 2026 at 5:30 PM in the spaces of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA) headquarters, the Pesti Vigadó. Alongside concerts, film screenings, workshops, and lectures, the programme also includes children’s activities as well as guided exhibition tours.

This year marks the fourth occasion on which visitors can view works by the MMA’s art scholarship holders in the sixth-floor exhibition spaces. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the work of the scholarship recipients who completed their programmes in 2025. The artworks are arranged along compelling analogies, reflecting upon one another. Visitors gain insight into a distinctive cross-section of the progressive, contemporary perspectives of Hungarian object makers. Geometric, lyrical, and abstract approaches appear alongside figurative, realistic, or surreal works and collage-like compositions—each an integral part of contemporary visual art, and thus of the exhibition itself.

Alongside subjective documentary photographic series shaped by artistic intuition and articulated through specific life situations, the exhibition presents works by designers and architects whose nature-oriented, sustainability-based outlook and commitment to pure functionality result in creations of refined simplicity. The works of folk artists are characterised by the renewed preservation of tradition—contemporary in attitude yet deeply rooted.

Curated by Iski Kocsis Tibor, Judit Józsa, and Bálint Szalai, the exhibition reveals a world of micro- and macro-narratives that emerge across different artistic fields and enter into dialogue with one another and with the viewer alike.