National Gallery Explores Artists’ Responses to Changing Nature

The Hungarian National Gallery’s new exhibition “Habitat” explores the relationship of art to nature and artists’ reactions to natural changes through sixty works (paintings, graphic and photographic series, sculptures, photo documentaries and videos) from the second half of the 19th century to the present day.

“The National Gallery is now presenting an exhibition that explores the most topical issue of our time, not in the context of contemporary culture, but by trying to explore a historical aspect,” said Zsolt Petrányi, Deputy Director General of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, opening the exhibition on Thursday.

Zsolt Petrányi recalled that with the development of agriculture and later the industrial revolution, people increasingly began to expropriate the environment, which, with the growth of the population, increasingly leads to an ecological crisis.

In recent decades, contemporary art has responded to this problem in a variety of ways, producing a wide range of works.

He said that in planning the exhibition, they tried to look at the historical aspect of the issue, that is why the decision was taken to select works from different collections of both the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts. The curators have taken the last 150 years in the collections as a starting point, and have looked at the behaviors, human and natural conditions that can be observed during this period.

The director stressed that

the exhibition does not take a position, nor does it hierarchize different points of view.

The principle of the exhibition is that classical and contemporary art are exhibited together, in dialogue with each other, so that the points of view become timeless.

Photo: MTI/Soós Lajos

By placing the problem of the ecological crisis in a broader context, the exhibition seeks to answer the question of how it is possible to redefine the relationship between nature and culture in the light of the conception of nature and landscape of previous centuries and the ecological perspective of the present.

The exhibition outlines the relationship of humanity and art to nature through six interlocking sections.

The romantic, sublime landscape, man-made environments, the landscape as an artistic tool through land art experiments, the questioning of the hierarchy of nature and human culture, and the perspective of non-human forms of life in the landscape are all represented.

Linda Alexandra Tarr (R), one of the curators. Photo: MTI/Soós Lajos

The curators aim to show how art has responded to changes in the natural environment over the past two hundred years, how the recognition that the concept of nature has changed with the industrialization of farming and agriculture, and how the diversity of relationships to nature has been expressed in art.

The works of artists such as László Mednyánszky and Gustave Courbet, Alan Sonfist, who was already a pioneer of ecological art in the 1970s, and the artists of the Pécs Workshop are on display. These works are in dialogue with works by contemporary Hungarian artists such as Tamás Dezső, Kitti Gosztola and Sára Luca Rózsa.

The exhibition, open from Friday to July 27, is curated by Katalin Harangozó, Sára Major, Linda Alexandra Tarr and Zsolt Petrányi.

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