31.7.17

Separate Ways. Karl-Heinz Adler and Hungarian abstract art












'Separate Ways. Karl-Heinz Adler and Hungarian abstract art'
in Kiscell Museum, a former monastery and church in Óbuda, Hungary.

"As his work was an example of abstract art, Adler was not allowed to participate in the official East-German art scene from the 1960s until 1988. At the same time however, his abstract geometrical forms made out of concrete were very popular decorations for facades and partitions; as a result, Adler’s architectural sculptures became a defining feature of the streets of Dresden and Berlin. Albeit a lot more subtly, but the dichotomy of banning abstraction in fine art but accepting it as a form of applied art was also characteristic of Hungarian cultural policy in the Kádár era. The exhibition explores a peculiar aspect of “Hungarian abstraction”: starting out from Karl-Heinz Adler’s geometrical architectural sculptures, it examines the ways in which geometrical abstraction appeared on Hungarian public buildings in the ’70s and ’80s."