Makovecz Imre: Drawings

An exhibition of internationally acclaimed architect Imre Makovecz's drawings will open on 21 March 2004. In 2003 Vince Publisher brought out an album containing Makovecz's drawings in one hundred numbered copies and printed on folios of hand-made paper. The Ernst Museum is now exhibiting the individual folios of this album, together with the original drawings and collages the prints were made from.

Studies like these drawings have had a great tradition in architectural history since Antiquity. Imre Makovecz's drawings portray the conflict between the creative imagination and the possibilities of realisation. This duality is not only intrinsic to these studies. Bearing witness to a state of transition between dream and real plans, these curious drawings reveal the duality intrinsic also to Makovecz's buildings-they, too, stand on the borderland between the possible and the impossible.

Having studied Karl Blossfeld's photographic collection, Makovecz went on to include in his drawings the motifs of floral buds, bursting leaves and flowers. These elements of vegetation vividly portray the forces of power inherent in nature. He incorporated the enlarged motifs of vegetation-organic architectural forms-in his buildings. Nature penetrates Makovecz's buildings in many ways, creating distinct regional features, or, by means of a single motif, such as a live tree, it becomes part of the structure, or exposes his buildings' features that are hidden from the eye-the material and character of the subterranean layers, the geological movements from time immemorial.