The first exhibition of the year, entitled Close to the Soil, opened in Modem in Debrecen

This year’s first exhibition of the Modem Modern and Contemporary Art Center in Debrecen, entitled Close to Soil, presents the works of the outstanding figures of Hungarian portrait and landscape painting.

The works for the exhibition, which can be visited from Sunday until the end of April, were selected from the Antal-Lusztig collection, and the reason for this was that the fourth specialist catalog, which elaborates on the collection, will be published in a month – said Katalin Vizi, the managing director of Modem.

According to the owner of the collection, Péter Antal, the exhibition featuring the works of László Mednyánszky, József Koszta, Adolf Fényes, Béla Iványi Grünwald, János Tornyai, Endre Béla, Oszkár Glatz, István Nagy, Gyula Rudnay, Ferenc Medgyessy and László Holló is for everyone, but in the Alföld to the living, who – to borrow the title of the exhibition – have been living close to the earth for centuries, it says something different than to foreigners, who do not know the essence of Hungarian destiny.

In the period between the two world wars, the artists articulated their attachment to Hungarian life, the wilderness, the Hungarian people, and poverty, but they also saw beauty in poverty and all that they could pass on to posterity, Péter Antal added.

According to the curator of the exhibition, Katalin T. Nagy, the Antal-Lusztig collection contains about half a thousand works by the eleven artists also appearing in Modem, but the exhibition presents only half of them.

As she explained, the landscape and the wilderness are presented throughout the works, but in addition to the landscapes, special attention is also paid to the portraits and depictions of people that depict the typical figures of Hungarian society. A separate section presents the shocking works of war painters working during the First World War, drawn from real experiences, but alongside the painters, one of the great sculptors of the era, Ferenc Medgyessy, whose works fit well into the spirit represented by the other artists, will also appear.