BUCHAREST- BUDAPEST BRIDGE
CONTEMPORARY ROMANIAN
AND HUNGARIAN ARTS
THE GÁBOR HUNYA COLLECTION
WHY IS GÁBOR HUNYA'S COLLECTION UNIQUE?
Gábor Hunya is an economist; currently he works for an international economic
research institute in Vienna. During his university years in Budapest he was attending
Frigyes Pogány's seminars on the aesthetics of architecture and was also a fervent visitor
of exhibitions. Although his first purchase of art didn't prove to be a quality choice,
his principles were established quite soon. Since his research focuses on the analysis of
the political-economic changes of Central and Eastern Europe, he started collecting
works of art as the cultural-historical reflexions of the years between the end of the
1980s and the middle of the 1990s. In his choices he relies on professional views of
some galleries, like Kisterem, Knoll and Várfok.
Gábor Hunya belongs to a group of relatively rare collectors. Being an academic
confers a financial constraint on him, yet, in a way this is an advantage considering his
attitude towards art collection. Collecting art as an intellectual with the rather modest
finances is not necessarily a disadvantage since a lot of artists appreciate the more modest,
but regularly returning and more knowledgeable collectors. They know that their
works will be placed next to other good pieces of art, and such works will, due to the
professional attention, sooner or later be displayed in an exhibition. They value the collector's
intellectual attitude, they regard him as a partner and they realise that next to
(or sometimes, instead) money they receive critical attention and friendship. They can
also fear less that their works will be soon sold at a contemporary auction.
Due to his expertise, Gábor Hunya was able to skip being schooled on modernist
paintings and, having started collecting contemporary art early on, he was able to
acquire some early and not any longer obtainable works by important artists. In the
meantime, thanks to his job, he could purchase contemporary art in an international
context to start with. His third advantage is that he has learned to appreciate not only
oil on canvas paintings but also some minor genres, experimental initiatives and atypical
works.
Beyond a strong aesthetic value, his collection is therefore also of documentary significance.
Not only beautiful (in fact, rather raw, grotesque, sometimes even brutal)
pieces of art are displayed in the collection, but the applied materials and techniques,
the backgrounds behind the works and their relatedness with one another also provide
us with a cultural-historical net. This is emphasised by the thematic nature of the collection. Many feel that reflection on social change has been missing from contemporary
Hungarian art of the last two decades. Artists have turned their back to the former,
obligatorily politicized way of creating art. When they adapt to international trends,
they often do so by ignoring special Hungarian features. This collection aims to acquire
works as artistic reflections on the political and social changes around 1989. At this
point it is important to remark that in Hungary there are hardly any collections
focussing on these very political processes. In the actual years in question there were
only a few collectors, and these concentrated more on Modernist auctions. Naturally,
now, many a collector search for works from that era, but more for their style than for
thematic reasons. At the turn of the 1990s the main customers of then-current works
were from abroad: the Iron Curtain had fallen, and Western buyers were attracted by
the previously "forbidden fruit" and the low prices.
