The Department of Fine Arts, founded in the autumn of 2015, provides high-quality practical and theoretical training, which is guaranteed by the staff of excellent instructors. The effectiveness of outstanding instructor activity can be measured by the success of the students at various artistic competitions, such as the National Art Students’ Associations Conferences. The course of nature art is unique in Hungarian and European higher education, so it is accompanied by a special international interest. Thanks to various student exchange programmes with various art universities mostly in Asia, as well as Erasmus scholarships, the department offers many additional opportunities for students to further expand their professional knowledge and international network. The student works presented here have not yet been created within the framework of the new training structure, ie. the BA training in Painting and Printmaking, but in the structure of the three specializations of the Visual Representation BA programme.
The Specialisation in PAINTING within the Visual Represenatation BA course provides the opportunity to explore and apply historical visual forms and visual expression possibilities. The focus of the course is, in accordance with the aspirations of contemporary art, to show the diversity of themes and genres, strengthen independent visual thinking, and enable the application of free creative mechanisms. The theoretical education of art history and aesthetics is complemented in a complex way by up-to-date studiowork, an extracurricular lecture series and by regular participation at national and international exhibitions and art colonies.
Our specialisation on PRINTMAKING places special emphasis on individual creative activites built upon the development of high-level drawing skills. In addition to mastering traditional reproduction and printing techniques (intaglio, relief and planographic printing), students are given the opportunity to develop conceptual visual projects and test the application of new technical media on a high level. Independent problem solving skills are developed through completing practical tasks within the framework of individual or group consultations and activities. In recent years, a benefical, fruitful crossing can be observed between pixel-based images and traditional graphics that has expanded the scope for graphic expression, opening a new horizon for image making. The strategy of the training of Printmaking at our department was designed with these tendencies in mind, and was initially implemented as a specialization in the framework of the art teacher training; from 2006 onwards it could be acquired as a specialisation in the newly introduced Bologna system. In 2019, we successfully accredited the five-year-long programme in Printmaking, thus students enrolled at the course can obtain an MA degree at the end of their studies. We trust that our students will graduate as well-informed artists with a thorough knowledge of art and contemporary visual culture who also have an individual artistic vision, and will prove themselves successful in the art scene. We also hope that our graduates will be able to pass on their knowledge to future generations through their teaching qualification.
The Specialization in NATURE ART is a specific sculpture training. Nature art seeks to restore harmony with nature. Creative activity is based on direct physical contact with nature, which directly applies natural materials, objects, energies, and locations. Time appears in concrete form in the resulting ephemeral works that are being created: creation exists at the time of cyclic changes in nature. In the studio, in the course of material processing, students are mainly confined to craft techniques - jointing, spinning, threading, binding, etc. –and use a minimum of machining. In addition to the studio activities, some of the practical lessons take place at the caves in Noszvaj, but the students also participate in many other art colonies and nature art events.
There is this thing with space. What it could be, how we shall imagine it. As something unequivocal? Or as some sort of empirical concept existing solely within us? And how are we located in relation to it? For me, as a lecturer of space, it shall be an obligation to see, demonstrate and comprehend all this. In the beginning everything seems to be easy: three dimensions, this way, that way and upwards, everything is stationary, calculated, exact and transparent. Yet, this youthful, immaculate, geometrical, Kantian space is demolished by Einstein, Bolyai, Foucault. The 20th and 21st centuries seem to upend the harmonious, uncomplicated space of our Newtonian physics and our bourgeoisie lives. We are tearing down the classicist paintings from the walls of our Belle Epoche lounge, but what shall we hang there instead? What captures our lives, our new spaces? Is there space at all or everything falls apart? Are the pieces going to be forged into something intact and create a whole ever again?
I think artistic pieces of the graduates of Visual Representation at the Visual Arts Institute facilitate – maybe not to find answers – but to continuously ask and scrutinise these questions, and this is not to be dismissed.
Let’s have a look at these works of art through this perspective. It is enough to scan through them to recognise that we will not encounter with conventional and canonical space experiences here, or with straightforward, nimble coordinate axes. To quote János Pilinszky, instead of the round, blazing, stationary perfection, these pieces are dominated by a broken, creased, torn reality1. Even if in a few pieces we get a glimpse of the ethereal or archaic as in Dorottya Dóka’s torsos or in Zsófia Bajzek’s and Csenge Kis’s nature art compositions, we cannot witness the whole again, nor are we endowed with a sense of calmness: only through the fragments of space and time can we be reminded of their inherent beauty.
Instead of linear stories we are trying to ensemble something from pieces and fragments, characters from limbs, and finally, we can even compose ourselves. If we occasionally succeed, we can stay at a placid plateau for the time being. If we fail, then we start going downwards, as in the paintings of Rita Horváth where we peek into the basement and see uncertain, dimly lit cut-out figures which conjure János Pilinszky again: “Hell is a space-experience. So is heaven. Two kinds of space. Heaven is open, we can see the other one down, as if in a basement room.”2 Finally we arrive at the yellow house of Szonja Szatmári, where the force of location demolishes itself and its inhabitants.
We can strive to find a firm grip, but for that, we have to embark on a seemingly infinite journey: on Krisztina Vígh’s slides which are sliding nowhere, in Nikoletta Blum’s urban or Kamilla Hajdu’s organic labyrinth or in our internal labyrinth depicted in Gergő Bíró’s graphics. But we do not have much hope to succeed. Yet, the spaces of these sites might guide us somewhere, where, finally we can feel that we are at home.
This fragmented space often features blurred, aimlessly floating objects like in Zsuzsanna Gábor’s installations. In a few fragments we recognise a strong resemblance to ourselves, our families, our love(?)d ones, like in the artworks by Enikő Bor or Eszter Bori. Surprisingly from these fragments we get to know more about ourselves then if we had seen something intact. The perceived space of our imagination assembles into one whole, and something happens which refutes everything we had learned before: the parts are more than the whole. If Heisenberg could have seen this... Henceforth, the parts are not additions but addictions: we are entangled in the vision, whether we want it or not. In the graphics of János Lakatos the fragments are brutal, but the „fragmentcreature” formed from these is even more brutal. And who knows what sort of creatures will be depicted through Szabolcs Jánosi’s pseudo-dimensions. While we get lost in the details, the fragmentcreature watches us. Watches and judges: it is merely a matter of time when we discover ourselves and our lives in these images.
Since these works of art, composed from pieces are like mirrors (sometimes even literally, like in the compositions of Mercédesz Gerván), but in these cases, due to these mirrors, we see ourselves less blurred and more clearly. A location is being formed from space, maybe our space, even if it is not exactly as imagined it. As Foucault writes: “The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.”
Our graduates, as their works of art prove, have learned a lot in Eger, maybe the most of what can be acquired: to ask those questions over and over again, which we are attempting to answer eternally in space and time. Even if they cannot mend our fragmented lives, we can be proud of them: we have set them out. We are less because of this, but more because of them.
Miklós Hoffmann
The author is a Professor with habilitation,
dean of the Faculty of Informatics at EKE.