Best of Budapest & Hungary

The Museum of Fine Arts in the Hungarian capital is reopening its renewed exhibition space for graphic art with an exhibition of reproductions of prints by a contemporary German and a 16th-century Venetian painter.

With the opening of the new exhibition space on the ground floor of the Museum of Fine Arts, the museum's graphic art collection of around 100,000 prints will be awakened from its ‘Sleeping Beauty’ sleep. The ground-floor space, which retains its historic furnishings, offers both a permanent exhibition on the history of the collection and temporary exhibitions.

The exhibition of reproductions of prints by Georg Baselitz and Andrea Schiavone juxtaposes the works of two artists who lived far apart in time but are similar in their ideas and artistic solutions.

Georg Baselitz, considered one of the most important contemporary artists, donated 30 large-scale prints to the museum in 2020, a few years after his life's work exhibition in Budapest, to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of the prints collection; this is the first time that a comprehensive selection of these works has been shown.

The majority of Schiavone's works were acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in 1871 from the Esterházy Collection, which formed the basis of the graphic art collection; the collection of 57 works is internationally significant.

The exhibition, which opens on Thursday, features around half a hundred works by the two artists.