SHADOW ON STONE

The Hungarian National Gallery continues its series of exhibitions on key personalities in Hungarian art with a show dedicated to Lili Ország (1926–1978), one of the most important and distinctive figures in modern Hungarian painting. The exhibition will be held between 16 December 2016 and 26 March 2017. As no comprehensive review of her life’s work has been held before, the commemoration of what would be the artist’s 90th birthday gives us an opportunity to rectify this shortcoming.

“The walls are inside me,” said Lili Ország, and throughout her entire œuvre, she unwaveringly portrayed the constantly materialising walls of her inner world with monastic patience and dedication.

In 1944, she managed to escape a train that was headed for a concentration camp, and thus eluded the tragic fate suffered by half a million Hungarian Holocaust victims; fear and apprehension ingrained her consciousness for the rest of her life. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts, she instinctively sought her “own thing”, and found her métier in the theme of walls. Almost unprecedentedly in Hungarian painting, she voiced her revelations in the tones of classical Surrealism. The most outstanding works in the history of Hungarian Surrealism were produced by her brush in the mid-1950s.

While Lili Ország was influenced by the Western classics, she is distinguished from them by the unique colouring of her visions. Having survived the hellish depths of her soul, it was only natural that she sought release in the transcendental. On her travels, she visited monasteries, where she came across the wonders of Slavic icons; in the following stage of her career, her Icon period, she began to paint sacral symbols.

Then, around 1960, she started to craft groundplans of cities – cities which had long lived within her, and cities she had once lived within. It was during this period that she developed her own singular means of expression, totally different from anyone else. This painting nursed no nostalgia for the past, but offered a sense of continuity, of the uninterruptedness of human existence, building on all that had come before.

Between 1966 and 1969 she worked on her “Script” artwork, characterised by a palette of greys and browns, featuring inscriptions, enigmatic Hebrew-like letters and various ciphers, against the backdrop of fragments of wall.

In her final period, labyrinths of electrical circuits appear in her works. “This labyrinth series I am painting is my labyrinth. I have to find my way through it, and I do this by painting it. It is dreadfully painful, but there is no other way. I have to find my way through.” Lili Ország continued to paint this series until her death; with her last work – in black – the door to the labyrinth closed upon her.

This exhibition brings together more than 300 works by Lili Ország, and offers two particularly special attractions. Firstly, the development of the artist’s vision is explored by presenting her works – in a totally unique way – alongside parallels from Hungary (Zoltán Kemény, Endre Bálint and Lajos Vajda) and abroad (Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Toyen and Paul Klee). And secondly, we have reconstructed the entire Labyrinth, consisting of a series of fifty works, in accordance with the artist’s original conception. This ensemble has only ever been displayed once before, at the Lili Ország memorial exhibition in 1979.

Accompanying the exhibition is a fully representative catalogue, illustrated with almost 250 reproductions as well as previously unseen archive photographs, and containing essays by prominent authors which outline the different periods in Lili Ország’s œuvre.

Lint to the exhibition: http://mng.hu/temporary_exhibitions/shadow-on-stone-the-art-of-lili-orszag-19261978-122730