Miklós Erdély: The Original and the Copy + Indigo Drawing

Miklós Erdély, Indigo Drawing, 1980, telex paper, carbon, graphite, Moderna galerija

14 September - 24 November 2013
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Maistrova 3

The winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts (Grand Prize of Honour)

Curated by: Annamária Szőke.

Miklós Erdély (1928-1986) - artist, architect, writer, poet, and filmmaker - was a major figure in the neo-avant-garde and conceptual art of Hungary. From the early seventies on, Erdély was continually engaged with the question of the original and the copy, or in a wider sense, with the problematics of pictorial representation, and many of the works he produced in the spirit of'a new concept of art' are related to these 'traditional' questions. The photographs in the exhibition are the logical and, in part, technical antecedents to the indigo (carbon paper) drawings on view, about which he said the following in 1983:
The whole indigo thing originates from the fact that I wanted to examine the representation aspect of art... ad absurdum. The representative character of art. I thought that this is a phenomenon of magical conception, that artistic depiction is the remains of magic in our contemporary world. And if this is the remains of magic, then this should be carried out ad absurdum.
(from the curator's essay)

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The exhibition was prepared in collaboration with the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Miklós Erdély Foundation (EMA), Embassy of Hungary, Ljubljana, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and Municipality of Ljubljana.