gyula muskovics

Unruly Constructions – Tamás Király and László Rajk

2017

Curated by Gyula Muskovics and Andrea Soós

Venue: Trapéz Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

During the last decade of Socialism in Hungary more and more artists felt a need to playfully reinvent the symbols of the system which then was already drawing near to its end. Such an artist was Tamás Király, who at that time was already a well-known representative of avant-garde fashion.

At times he gave a Parliament dome-shaped hat with a red star on it, at other times he organised photoshoots at the pedestal of the Soviet Statue of Liberty in Budapest, to record a collection recalling the lean forms of the Bauhaus. The exhibition aimed at initiating a dialogue around those momentums of Király which criticised the system in the 1980s. Beside documents which had not been presented in a long while, the exhibition also presented a reconstructed version of Király’s red star-shaped dress from in 1987.

Two works of László Rajk, a decisive figure of deconstructive architecture from this particular era, also appear in the exhibition. The connection between the two oeuvres arises not only for they often worked together. Király’s sculptural dresses and Rajk’s spiky constructions criticised the anomalies of the decaying system in a similar manner, by appropriating and recycling the revolutionary aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde.

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