The Shortening Future

The Graphic Arts Collection's latest series of exhibitions, launched in 2023, will focus on late works by artists, juxtaposing new acquisitions with the collections and contemporary art. Géza Perneczky (1936), a Hungarian artist who spent most of his career in Germany, has recently donated his recent watercolour series, created over the past decade, to the Graphic Arts Collection. Now nearly 90 years old, his works, with a very different tone and technique from his earlier works, are a thoughtprovoking way of drawing attention to a body of work in which his late works differ from those of his earlier periods. Géza Perneczky became a major figure on the Hungarian and international art scene in the 1960s with his conceptual works, including those associated with the Fluxus movement, and his significant theoretical work. The mail art works in our collection are not primarily of artistic value in terms of their material or visuality, but rather in their impact on the level of thought. His new works, which take a very different approach, are serene and atmospheric, thanks to the classical art technique of watercolour, which, instead of exploring conceptual art theory, draw their content from the classical starting point of art, the observation of the world. The artist, taking a kind of liberty, has captured the subculture of the beach, but without denying himself, with a conceptual twist. What could be the reason and motivation for this change of genre and style? is the question we ask in our exhibition, which also draws on classic works from our collection. In addition to the works of Géza Perneczky, the works of Francisco de Goya, Camille Corot, Édouard Manet, August Rodin, ToulouseLautrec, Pablo Picasso, among others, will be presented, showing not only earlier examples of themes and artistic solutions that preoccupied the mature artists in their last years. The exhibition will contribute to the debate on the phenomenon of ageing and the changing boundaries of the age of the individual, which is often the subject of discussion today, by providing lessons to be learned from examples of art.