Fernando Botero: Museum of Fine Arts

Fernando Botero
Fernando Botero

A new temporary exhibition was launched at the Museum of Fine Arts at the Heroes Square in Budapest yesterday. In my eyes this seems to be a quite family friendly exhibition, as the paintings made by Fernando Botero looks both funny, interesting and quite cool.

Fernando Botero is a Latin American contemporary painter.

Fernando Botero’s paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Fine Arts
September 30 – February 20, 2011

Budapest museums

Botero exhibition in Museum of Fine Arts Budapest
Botero exhibition in Museum of Fine Arts Budapest

Press release about the exhibition:
Rotund and voluptuous forms, characteristically simple and expressive figures, people, animals and objects dominate the works of Colombian-born Fernando Botero. The language of his colourful and often luminous works is understandable for all; he opens up a seemingly distant Latin American reality and transforms it into a familiar world. His works are linked by the underlying quality of universality and his use of the most elemental gestures renders his ideas of the world and its various phenomena visible. Botero is a productive artist and a leading figure of contemporary art whose works can be found in public collections in countries across the world including Japan, Russia, Germany, Finland, Italy, Colombia and the United States. A selection of the masterpieces of the last twenty years can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest between 30 September 2010 and 23 January 2011.

Some sixty, mostly large oil paintings and sculptures will be presented at the exhibition, allowing an insight into a unique world that can be described by a kind of striving for monumentality and timelessness rooted in the ancient Greco-Latin tradition, while demonstrating how the artist draws inspiration and pays tribute to the classical European masters and invites visitors to the land of Latin America throbbing with life and colour.

Based on their themes, the paintings can be grouped into still-lifes, paraphrases, as well as the places and events of life in Latin America: everyday streets, colourful houses, the circus and bullfighting arenas. The concept of the exhibition is not exclusively built around a thematic arrangement of the works since it also focuses on the precedents that appear in the painting of the Colombian artist.

Nuda Veritas, Gustav Klimt in Museum of Fine Arts

Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt Budapest

A new exhbition has just been opened in the Museum of Fine Arts. It is named “Nuda Veritas. Gustav Klimt and the Origins of the Vienna Secession 1895–1905.” This will for sure be an exhibition bringing many tourists to Budapest, but it will also draw people from Hungary to Budapest.  On the official homepage of the Museum of Fine Arts we can read that “the spiritual leader and first president of the Vienna Secession, Gustav Klimt, will be accorded a highlighted place in the exhibition, which will not only display his significant paintings, such as Nuda Veritas – “naked truth”, included in the title of the exhibition, but also a group of his drawings evocative of a work that has not survived but which represented an important phase of his artistic career: the three murals symbolising the faculties of the University of Vienna. ”

I guess it is only to get to the museum and check it out, at least if you are interested.

Nuda Veritas. Gustav Klimt and the Origins of the Vienna Secession 1895–1905
Museum of Fine Arts
September 23 – January 9 (2011)

Museums in Budapest

Visual Poetry, Concrete Texts: Museum of Fine Arts

This might not be the hottest exhibition of the year in the Museum of Fine Arts, but if you are interested feel free to visit while at the Heroes Square. The description below is the official description of the exhibition.

Visual Poetry – Concrete Texts
Museum of Fine Arts
January 13 – May 9

Museums in Budapest

More information on the temporary exhibition:
The various forms of visual poetry – or experimental poetry as it is also known- came into existence along the fringes of traditional forms of literature, the visuals arts and music. Their role in modern art was always that of reconnecting branches of art that had taken different directions according to new points of view as well as the opening up of the possibilities hidden within already existing materials of expression.

The Open Structures Art Society’s (OSAS) new, international exhibition brings together original works, copies and details of works dating from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. Several characteristic periods and areas meet within the bounds of the exhibition: Western type, coarse, typographical concrete poetry; visual poetry, which had been influenced by Concept Art and Structuralism; visual poetry’s own characteristic Hungarian form, represented by picture poems by Hungarian writers; and contemporary Japanese visual literature from the representative collection of Austrian artist Josef Linschinger. Several historical film and contemporary phonetic works of poetry compliment the visual materials on display.

From Degas to Picasso: Museum of Fine Arts

If you would like to see masterpieces from French painters painted between the middle of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, you better head towards the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest between January 28 and April 25. During that period there will be a temporary exhibition there presenting more than 50 paintings from the given period. All the paintings are borrowed from the Puskin Museum in Moscow for this exhibition.

Among the paintings you can see masterpieces made by Courbet, Corot, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso.

From Degas to Picsso
Museum of Fine Arts
January 28 – April 25, 2010

Budapest museums

The Alchemy of Beauty: Museum of Fine Arts

A new exhibition is coming to the Museum of Fine Arts located at the Heroes Square in Budapest. The full name of the exhibition is: “The Alchemy of Beauty: Parmigianino – Drawings and Prints”. It seems as if the Museum of Fine Arts likes Italy as this is their third exhibition in a row featuring paintings and works of Italians!

The Alchemy of Beauty
Museum of Fine Arts
1 December 2009 – 15 March 2010

Some words about the exhibition from the organizers:
The graceful elegance of Parmigianino’ works was regarded by his contemporaries and the succeeding generations as the perfection of style. The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest does not preserve any of his paintings, however, we own an extensive collection of his drawings and prints. Parmigianino was a passionate and prolific draughtsman. Almost one thousand sheets have survived, representing the richest drawing oeuvre of sixteenth-century Italy, with the exception of Leonardo. The diversity of the themes and techniques of the twenty autograph drawings in the Collection of Prints and Drawings represent every period of the artist’s career and provide an insight into his magnificent art.

Museums in Budapest

From Botticelli to Titian: Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition

From Botticelli to Titian

A new exhibition is on its way to the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Just as the Turner and Italy exhibition is about to close a new temporary exhibition with focus on Italy is on the way. The title of the exhibition is “From Botticelli to Titian: Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art.”

Since the Museum of Fine Arts has a lot of paintings from old Hungarian masters they felt it right to launch an exhibition focusing in on the Italian painters, presenting different painters and styles. Paintings will also be borrowed in from fine arts museums in Italy, so this will be a dazzling experience for those in love with italian art.

From Botticelli to Titian:
Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art
October 28, 2009 – February 14, 2010

Special Thursday programs in Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest arranges special programs every second Thursday to attract both Hungarian and international visitors. So far it has been a major success, and in October you can join such events October 8 and October 22. Below you can see the museum programs on these days (they have extended opening times these evening, which means the museum of Fine Arts is open until 22.00).

Program October 8
Jazz Salon (Marble Hall):
From 6.00pm This Week’s Guest: Four Brothers

Experiencing works-of-art:
7.00pm Guided Tour in English! „Each Painting Tells a Story?” (Old Master’s Gallery) by Ellen Mozley

Program October 22
Jazz Salon (Marble Hall):
From 6pm This Week’s Guest: Cosmos Trio and Dóra Szolnoki

Experiencing works-of-art:

7pm Guided Tour in English! “Martyrs & Saints of Christianity” by Zsuzsanna Gyenis

Turner and Italy: Museum of Fine Arts

Turner and Italy - Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts hosts an exhibition called Turner and Italy presenting Turners work in eight parts, ordered chronologically. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was especially known for his landscape paintings, and at the temporary exhibition you can see more than 80 paintings painted my Turner himself.

The exhibition opened July 15 and will be in the Museum of Fine Arts until October 25, 2009 – which means that there is not much time left for those still interested in visiting the exhibition. The full price ticket for the Turner and Italy exhibition is 2600 Forint. The full price for the permanent exhibition is 1400 Forint.

More about Joseph Mallord William Turner:
Joseph Mallord William Turner was one of the most significant landscape painters of the 19th century and indeed perhaps in the entire history of art. His hugely extensive oeuvre is characterised by thematic diversity and endless technical innovation. He painted true-to-life city- and landscapes – he was especially fond of depictions of the sea -, historical and mythological scenes, contemporary events, but his imagination was also inspired by literature.