Cross-border relations with neighboring Hungary have traditionally been a priority for the province of Lower Austria, a diverse cultural exchange takes place between the two countries in various fields, such as music, monument preservation, literature, and the visual arts.
On the occasion of the Hungarian presidency of the Working Community of the Danube Regions (ARGE Donauländer) 2023-2024, in cooperation with the Hungarian Academy of Arts in Budapest (Magyar Művészeti Akadémia – MMA), six Hungarian artists were invited to present their works in the Ausstellungsbrücke St. Pölten, a Gallery, run by the province of Lower Austria, under the title "Young Hungarian Contemporaries 2024." This collaboration, which began in 2020, is now being continued: entitled 'The Glory of Beauty,' an exhibition of works by four visual artists from Lower Austria will be on view at Pesti Vigadó from June 28 to August 24, 2025.

Exhibition „THE GLORY OF BEAUTY“

With modernism, the relationship between art and beauty began to become disparate (Impressionism was ugly painting, according to critics of the time) and became more radical in Viennese Modernism in the work of Egon Schiele (in whom ugliness was not established as a distinct aesthetic category, but as an existential mode of being). The events of the First and Second World Wars led to a refusal of art after 1945; beauty became a taboo concept or was quickly disavowed as kitsch. It was not until documenta 12 in 2007 that the concept of "beauty" was focused on in a global and essential way for the first time, situating it for viewers as a "space of possibility for art." Beyond consumerist and romantic notions of beauty, beauty is understood as an anthropological phenomenon that has contained transcendent, epistemological and philosophical aspects since antiquity: beauty and truth, for example, in European classicism and aesthetics of the 18th century, beauty as knowledge or spirituality in sacred art.
Using contemporary, diverse paintings and sculptures, the exhibition "The Glory of Beauty" explores various aspects of beauty without making it an explicit, reflective theme of the works. Beauty is also understood as a mental dimension of perception that implies temporality, emotions such as melancholy, longing, transience, or transfiguration. Due to the spatial constraints, the exhibition will primarily feature large-format works by artists such as Eduard Angeli, Franziska Maderthaner, Rudolf Leitner-Gründberg, and Johann Berger.

The exhibition curator is Mag. Carl Aigner.

The exhibition is supported by: Hungarian Academy of Arts