The rich exhibition, selected and organised by curators Krisztina Szipőcs, Veronika Baksa-Soós and Krisztina Üveges, occupies all three floors of the museum and includes everything from late works by Picasso bought by the Ludwigs to the most recent Hungarian and other Eastern European works.
Starting from top to bottom, the exhibition can be interpreted as the fulfilment of the avant-garde. The focus has been placed on painting, but the material also includes some installations, videos and sculptures. In addition to well-known American and British pop-art icons Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, John Jaspers and David Hockney, works by Hungarian artists of the 60s and 70s, including Ilona Keserü, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Gyula Gulyás, Imre Bak and István Nádler, are on display. The earliest works - a Warhol from 1964 and a Picasso from 1967 - represent two completely opposite paths for art, and the exhibition traces both of these. The most important European trends are represented by some of the greatest names alongside lesser-known East European artists. Some of the major movements of the 1980s are also represented, such as performance and body art. Tibor Hajas' staggering series and Miklós Erdély's War Secrets, a nod to Orwell's 1984, are followed by works from the painting renaissance of the 1980s and constructivism. The latter is represented mainly by the works of Gábor Bachman.
Then the representatives of a generation that started their careers in the years of the post-communist transformation are featured, artists who introduced video and other new materials into their paintings. The exhibition shows works by Hungarian, Russian, Romanian and other Eastern European artists whose works reflect the post-communist transformation. Included is Dan Perjovschi's excellent piece Glass-Nost and Teodor Grauer's tableaux Star - Made in Romania.
