Quotation Marks | A Memorial Exhibition of Károly Kelemen (1948-2024)

Featuring some 150 works, the exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the artist's multi-decade oeuvre, tracing the defining periods of his career. Károly Kelemen’s work ranks among the most significant achievements of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde and postmodern turn. Following his conceptual experiments in the 1970s—which reached the outer limits of objectless art and the “zero point” of exhibition-making—he deliberately returned to easel painting and the creation of physical objects. The early conceptual phase of his career is evoked in the exhibition through the most telling excerpts from an unreleased video interview conducted by Orshi Drozdik, offering visitors deeper insight into the background of Kelemen’s theorizing painting. At the heart of his artistic philosophy lay a firm rejection of egocentric, “subjective” painting; in its place, appropriation art and critical reflection became central to his work.

Kelemen personally developed his signature “eraser painting” technique. Created at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, these hyperrealist works—applied to canvas and then partially erased—evoked and simultaneously dismantled the classics of the avant-garde (Warhol, Beuys, Pollock). He returned to this technique in the early 2000s, creating his series Indelible Communism.

In the New Sensibility exhibitions launched in 1981, curator Lóránd Hegyi assigned Kelemen a prominent role as the first artist in Hungary to raise questions regarding the crisis of modernism and the avant-garde, championing material sensitivity and subjective historicism over Conceptualism.

After his monochrome eraser paintings, Kelemen’s palette grew increasingly vibrant. His monumental tarot-card paintings were followed in the mid-1980s by canvases that elevated the Teddy bear figure into a universal icon. The peak of his engagement with art-historical memory and the avant-garde’s “transformation into museum art” materialized in his series of reflective variations on Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the work that set off the avant-garde revolution.

In a nonfigurative series of 1997, he glued glass eyes onto the canvas, at once “animating” abstract painting—which he considered “dead”—and highlighting the reciprocal relationship between viewer and artwork. In his 2006 Kassák-series, he re-colored Sándor Bortnyik’s linocut, paraphrasing and subverting Andy Warhol’s portrait series of contemporary celebrities.

The exhibition brings together theoretical depth and visual appeal, demonstrating how the reinterpretation, destruction and reconstruction of canonical works became the foundation of a distinctive form of subjective historicism.