Years of transition: the 1980s in Hungary and Eastern Europe

Project leader: Júliusz Huth, Kristóf Nagy

The Research Department’s project about the 1980s aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of Hungary’s visual arts during the decade, considering cultural and economic policies as well as global contexts and connections.

The research project examines key aspects of the period, including the transformation of the art institutional system, major artistic debates, critical discourses, and the emergence of new painting trends and postmodern theories. It also explores the blending of experimental and underground movements with various art forms and investigates Hungary’s regional and international artistic networks. Notably, the research team’s participation in the Getty Foundation-funded project Understanding 1989 in East-Central European Art further strengthened the international dimension of the study.

Ongoing since 2022, the research has included a conference titled The Flowers of Decay– The Art of Hungary in the 1980s, interviews with key figures from the decade, and an extensive review of 1980s art criticism. This work culminated in an anthology analysing the debates that shaped the Hungarian art scene during the period. Published in Hungarian, the volume is titled Exhibitions and Criticism: Discourses on Visual Art in the 1980s. As part of the research project, we are organizing an international conference for 2026 on the entanglement of postmodern art and the capitalist transition in Eastern European art of the 1980s.

Past events:

• What Can the Perspective of Borderlands Internationalism Offer Art Historians? A lecture by Joseph Grim Feinberg, 05.15.2025. 

• Exhibitions and Criticism/ Book launch in Pécs, 14. 04. 2025
• Exhibitions and Criticism/Book launch, 05. 02. 2025.
• Crisis or bloom? Debates on Art in the 1980s - Institutional system under the radar: with Gábor Andrási, Tamás Török and Tibor Várnagy – 30. 04. 2024
• How Eastern Europe got the Idea of Contemporary Art? - webinar, 02. 11. 2022
• The Contradictions of 1980s Alternative Art - Lecture of Katja Praznik, Slovenian cultural researcher, 14. 06. 2022
• The Flowers of Decay - The Art of Hungary in the 1980s - conference, 06. 01. - 05. 31. 2022

Image source: photo by György Galántai from the lecture of Miklós Erdély: Democratic Painting (Kossuth Klub, 05.03.1984). Published in Aktuális Levél 9, p. 14, 1984