A city has many faces. The faces of a city are the people who live and work here, but also the streets and buildings, the natural environment. The faces of Szeged are also the faces of the artists who work here, whose works also show us new faces of the city. A selection from the Fine Arts Collection of the Móra Ferenc Museum presents some of the thousands of faces of Szeged through the eyes of artists with local ties. All the while, the exhibition is a journey through time, taking us back through the artists’ careers and works to the sometimes turbulent, sometimes turbulent, sometimes turbulent periods of 19th and 20th century Szeged. The works of the city’s most outstanding painters allow us to experience the holidays and everyday life of the Tisza peasantry, stroll through the streets of the period, and watch the festive fireworks from the banks of the Tisza. Their stories will give us a first-hand experience of the impact of the two world wars on the town and its inhabitants. At the same time, we will learn about Szeged’s long tradition of painting. Szeged’s painting has its own “flavour”, incorporating local social and natural features, but at the same time it keeps up with the trends of the time in Hungary and Western Europe with impressive vigilance. Almost all of our artists studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, in Munich or at the art school in Nagybánya. Most of them went on study trips to Paris, Rome or other parts of Italy. Thanks to them, painting in Szeged has been able to keep in touch with contemporary trends despite the historical vicissitudes. Moreover, at the same time, the city’s artists, including writers and poets, are linked to each other by one or more threads. The intricate web of their connections is a drawing of the art that traverses Szeged and the Szeged countryside like a diving path.

The collection of the Ferenc Móra Museum of Fine Arts preserves unique and incomparably valuable pieces of 19th and 20th century art. The exhibition “Faces of Szeged” is a subjective selection of these works, strung on the thread of “Szegedness”. The exhibition features works by artists with ties to Szeged, primarily inspired by Szeged: street scenes, life portraits, midweek and holidays of the city in the decades of the 20th century. The artists in the exhibition have followed very different paths in their lives, but what they have in common is their commitment to painting and their attachment to the city of Szeged, which is also expressed in their art. Sometimes in a very concrete way (e.g. Ferenc Dinnyés’ Woman of the Paprika Slicer or Ferenc Joachim’s city paintings), sometimes in the form of pure, bright colours reflecting the sunshine of the Southern Great Plain (e.g. Sándor Nyilasy and Károly Vlasics’ works or Ödön Heller’s: Girls of Tápé, which can also be seen on the exhibition poster).

The exhibition “Faces of Szeged” brings the city’s past to life through the painters’ life stories and works, which are often full of adventures and even difficulties. It also shows how up-to-date the painters connected to the city have been with the latest international trends and how they have responded to them in their own art. The exhibition includes a number of works that the public is seeing for the first time in decades, as well as some that are being exhibited for the first time since they were first brought to the museum.

The artists in the exhibition:
Vinkler László
Fischer Ernő
Erdélyi Mihály
Tóbiás György
Vlasics Károly
Szöri József
Kukovetz Nana
Dinnyés Ferenc
Károlyi Lajos
Heller Ödön
Nyilasy Sándor
Joachim Ferenc
Tóth-Molnár Ferenc
Hódi Géza

The exhibition is open from 6 May 2024 to 2 June 2024.