Reformation 500 – The Bible of Lajos Szalay’
2016. Nov. 27. - 2017. Feb. 19.
The themes of creation, the covenant, grace, temptation and promise were explored through the prints of Lajos Szalay in the exhibition at MODEM, the first in a series of large-scale exhibitions organised to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The Kovács Gábor Art Foundation, in cooperation with the Reformed Theological University of Debrecen, commemorated the 500th anniversary of the Reformation with this extraordinary series of exhibitions. The four exhibitions showcased works inspired by the Bible, which confronted us with life’s crucial questions.
Lajos Szalay (1909-1995) Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian graphic artist, innovator of 20th century Hungarian drawing. In 1946 he went to Paris and then lived and worked abroad – in Argentina and the United States – for more than 40 years, returning to Hungary only in 1988. His art is recognised worldwide, and legend has it that Pablo Picasso himself said of him, “If two graphic artists of the twentieth century survive for posterity, the other will be me, if only one, it will be Lajos Szalay.”
The Bible is an eternal and inescapable inspiration. The defining source of Szalay’s creative work is his relationship with Scripture and his encounter with transcendence. The artist first turned his experiences of the Old and New Testaments into art in the early 1960s.
He considered the highlight of his life’s work to be his 1973 album of drawings entitled Genesis, which traces the most important moments of the Old Testament through 124 drawings. The pictures, however, are not simple biblical illustrations: the text and the drawings are at first a nice fit, but Szalay later gradually highlights certain elements, varies the theme, and then the interpretation becomes almost mundane. Through the speed and freshness of the drawing genre, and his ability to react immediately to the subject, the artist was able to dramatise the decisive moments that form the axis and essence of each story.
He used drawing elements to make his stories readable: to make them tangible, to make them an experience. “Boston millionaire Dorothy Wallace commissioned a portfolio of thirty drawings on religious themes. I did the 30 drawings, and the idea started to develop on its own, and eventually I took all my drawings of a celebratory nature and put them into a particular approach, strung them on the string of the Bible like beads, and that became Genesis. […] Taking every moment seriously is what I feel gives both religious and non-religious drawings their solemnity. That one is somehow always facing the infinite, in a terrible and inescapable state of ultimate and personal responsibility…”.
The Kovács Gábor Artists Foundation has the largest collection of Lajos Szalay’s works in Hungary. The collection of drawings, selected for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, presents a comprehensive presentation of Szalay’s drawings inspired by the Old and New Testament and the fertilizing influence of the stories he chose. This group of works spans his entire oeuvre, mostly drawings, with a small number of paintings and a few reproductions of copperplate prints.
The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Human Resources, the Kovács Gábor Art Foundation and the Reformed Theological University of Debrecen.
Curator: Kosinsky Richárd
Artist: Szalay Lajos