Image movements

Image movements  works by  Ferenc Martyn, Károly Kismányoky, Katalin Nádor and Kálmán Szijártó – curatorial guided tour by Veronika Pócs

The exhibition is a selection of phase drawings and photo collages from the animated film Martyn 1983, directed by Károly Kismányoky (1943–2018), with the participation of Ferenc Martyn (1899–1986). It presents the works using museum methods (framing, matboard) and conferring a state of autonomous, unique works of art. These works, on the one hand, create possible variations of Martyn images chosen by the director from different periods of his oeuvre, further striking abstract motifs, and, on the other hand, imitate the movement of the creative process. The static, finished works and moments of endless variations create special, unique connections between fine art and film (projected at the exhibition).

Two artists of the Pécs Workshop, Károly Kismányoky and Kálmán Szijártó (1946) applied their own aesthetic principles to Martyn’s oeuvre, focusing on the creation, instead of the finished works themselves. The homage to one of the most significant artists of modern Hungarian art and the continuation of the oeuvre, its continuously renewing content, form and technical attitude, and its interpretation from a different artistic point of view are present in this film and in the works of art made for the film.

This is a joint artistic work of master and disciples. Thus, the exhibition also features Kálmán Szijártó’s drawings imitating Martyn’s bird motif and Kismányoky’s photo series, using enlargements of Martyn’s calligraphic lines.

The recently discovered photographer Katalin Nádor (1938–2018), who was  presented at the Paris Photo last year, documented Martyn’s oeuvre as an art photographer at the Janus Pannonius Museum. The exhibition includes two of her works: a series of physiognomic portraits of Martyn and another, in which Martyn can be seen at the Pannonia Film Studio in Pécs during the sequences of the creation of a drawing.

The film is based on the basic structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses, illustrated by Martyn – on a fictional day and in a single location, in the Martyn house – the image movements unfold to the music of György Kurtág.

Martyn’s exemplary art created a unique connections between universal and local through the aesthetic quality of his works. This also included his unwavering commitment to modern art, which viewed the artistic compromises in Hungary in the interwar period from the outside, and which also consistently represented abstract art during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s with natural freedom. He created a tradition, the worthy heirs of which were the excellent artists of Hungarian fine art in Pécs: István Gellér B., Ferenc Lantos, Ilona Keserü, and the members of the Pécs Workshop.