March 1, 2012
, 6 pm
Public opening: March 2, 2012
The Kepes Institute, Eger, Hungary
Széchenyi I. utca 16, Eger, Hungary
[email protected], Juliet Kepes Stone, [email protected]
The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology congratulates The Kepes Institute, Museum and Cultural Center in Eger, Hungary, on the occasion of its inauguration.
There will be an inaugural ceremony for the opening of the Kepes Institute, Museum and Cultural Center on March 1, 2012 at 6:00pm and a public opening on March 2 at the newly renovated facility in historic Eger, Hungary. The Institute will honor and showcase the legacy of Gyorgy Kepes as one of the most influential theorists and educators in the field of visual arts in the 20th Century and a renowned painter, photographer, designer and visual artist. Marton Orosz, a researcher who is writing the monograph of Kepes, writes that “with a lifelong career in the US, the Hungarian born Gyorgy Kepes was one of the few artists of the 20th Century who first recognized the new possibilities of scientific thinking and founding of a new visual language that changed the human relationship to its environment and inspired complex cross-disciplinary collaborations.”
The Kepes Institute will feature a permanent exhibition of paintings, photographs, light installations, artifacts, and writings. It will also provide a state of the art facility for cultural events, lectures and symposiums and will be a place where international dialogue and creative work can take place stimulated by the multifaceted contributions and achievements of Kepes, his colleagues and students. This will be further enhanced by temporary exhibits of important contemporary artists working today reflecting the spirit and ideas of Kepes. The first artist represented in this series will be Vera Molnar, a Hungarian born artist from France who has received the Legion of Honor for her important work, paintings, writings and constructions.
Kepes’ works in the collection are organized to create a cohesive intersection that represents his belief that art and science are intimately connected and can work together symbiotically. The Center offers visitors and collaborators a tangible experience of his vision and provides a platform for discovery and further inquiry and experimentation. The Museum’s extensive permanent collection chronicles Kepes’ work from the start of his career. This includes his avant-garde period in the 1930s, then as a colleague of László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin represented by his photographs of extreme perspectives and urban-socio themes. Cameraless photograms also represent Kepes’s New Bauhaus period in Chicago. Later, during his tenure at MIT’s Architectural Department as Professor of visual design, during which his painting style shifted towards abstract expressionism. His time as Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Design at MIT includes examples of his work and works of his students and collaborators. The Museum will display documents, letters, drawings and examples of his writing, theoretical works and his books; The New Landscape and the Language of Vision along with his Vision and Value series which have been published in many languages and are an integral part of Architecture, Art and Design schools curriculum today.
Kepes was the only Institute professor in the arts at MIT and his work is in permanent collections of many museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, The MFA in Boston, the Corcoran in DC and the Bauhaus Museum in Berlin.
In conjunction with the opening in Hungary, Alpha gallery in Boston will celebrate the event with a solo exhibit of Kepes’ Paintings and Photographs from the 1940s to the 1980s opening Saturday, March 3, 2012 at 37 Newbury Street through April 4.
