A Puzzle of Seventy-Seven+7 Pieces
16 May 2025 – 31 January 2026
Curators Anikó B. Nagy and Blanka Fábián
Location: BHM Museum Kiscell, H-1037 Budapest, Kiscelli utca 108.
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10 am–6 pm
The Municipal Gallery’s collection exhibition is showcased in the Baroque corridors and three smaller rooms of our museum, nestled between furniture pieces left behind from earlier interior exhibitions. Balancing the strong atmosphere of this historical setting with the autonomy of fine art, creating dialogues, counterpoints, and unexpected connections, proved an exciting curatorial challenge.
Since the 1980s, postmodern perspectives have profoundly reshaped how we think about museums. The uniform, linear perception of historical development has been questioned, value systems and hierarchies based on fixed categories have receded. Rethinking the relationship between museums and the community has become increasingly essential, while the “one true story” written from an omniscient perspective has been gradually replaced by parallel narratives offering diverse interpretations. Consequently, the concept of the permanent exhibition has also gained a new meaning: today, the expectation is not “permanence” but openness to social and historical contexts and presentation that adapts to continually changing perspectives.
The Municipal Gallery does not have a permanent exhibition, and if it ever had, it would rather take on a continually evolving, renewing form. This exhibition, born from the desire to present our collection, was created in the spirit of this transformed thinking about museums. Some works have been shown before; others are new selections, reflecting on themes such as war and peace, chosen and forced identities, and the dynamics of enemy-making in contemporary discourse.
At the entrance, a mini textile collage commemorates our late colleague, Péter Fitz—Director of the Municipal Gallery between 1994 and 2014—who passed away at Christmas 2024. The collage came from his personal collection.
As visitors step into the sequence of winding, gradually opening spaces, they encounter works from various periods, movements, and attitudes in unusual juxtapositions, framed by powerful social-historical contexts. The exhibition’s title refers to the way the material is organized: various historical and contemporary artworks are linked through thematic threads, forming finely woven networks and a complex structure reminiscent of a puzzle’s logic.
Interpreting the concept of art broadly, we also included many objects in the exhibition that were created outside the traditional boundaries of fine art, yet convey profound emotional or social content: popular graphic prints, tableaus of social campaigns, badges, pins, and various accessories. Although these works may appear modest and small in scale at first glance, their layered relation to identities and political content makes them extremely rich; they serve as suggestive mirrors of everyday experience.
FEATURED ARTWORKS
The exhibition unfolds in five thematic sections. Since a few important viewpoints were missing from the emerging narrative, alongside the 77 works from our collections, we also included 7 artworks as guests.
The main axis of the exhibition is the unit titled Hard Times, focusing on the artistic imprints of 20th– and 21st-century wars, authoritarian regimes, and historical upheavals. Works loyal to, and critical of, these systems fill the space with tension and dynamism, raising urgent questions about artistic responsibility, collaboration, resistance, and the relationship between morality and aesthetics.
The rooms opening from this area showcase Montage, a collection of objects that condenses the exhibition’s methodology, and Labelled, a selection presenting works by artists who suffered marginalization, rejection, or exclusion due to their ethnic, religious, or sexual identity.
The third room, called Women’s Hands, presents artistic reflections on activities traditionally associated with women, often invisible and unpaid. Among the artworks, idealizing, critical, and feminist approaches are also represented.
At the end of the exhibition, visitors’ attention is once again drawn back to the place where we started: in the rooms Óbuda, Kiscell, a selection capturing the scenery and atmosphere of the museum and its immediate surroundings in the past century and today is featured.
The exhibition explores all kinds of stories, tragedies, dead ends, and hardships, approaching them in multiple registers—sometimes with irony, sometimes with candour. Through the dialogue and occasional confrontation between the artworks, an intellectual and emotional space unfolds where, alongside compassion, the possibilities of resolution also open up.