Marked by LAKNER’s signature dark tone and a brownish palette, Silence is an early exemplar of Hungarian Photorealism, which can be understood both as something that emerged parallel with Western Hyperrealism, and as a follow-up to the Hungarian tradition of realistic painting. Originating and developing in the United States and Western Europe, Photorealism gained a peculiar, often political, overtone in East Central Europe, a region grappling with the heritage of Socialist Realism. Lakner liked to represent structures and layers of substances in his photo-based, conceptual paintings. This work is based on the photographic documentation of a felt environment Beuys created; the sheets of felt are piled up to make a still life in this bravura canvas. This tribute to the Western artist legend, who was teaching at the Düsseldorf academy at the time, is exhibited together with Beuys’s own felt object, Sealed Letter (1967), which reinforces the objectness of the painting.
P. V.
Related contents
1–2–3: The Collection in Focus – 3rd Floor Exhibition Space 16. November, 2007 – 2. May, 2010
This is the first time since the initial exhibitions of the Ludwig Museum in 1991 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996 that the Museum’s own collection has been put in full focus.
Westkunst - Ostkunst. A Selection from the Collection 1. August, 2017 – 26. January, 2020
The newly set collection display makes attempts to present emphatic points not only in well-organised chronological order or along stylistic features, but to examine the characteristics, consonances, differences as well as the artistic-cultural parallels between Western and Eastern art.