Surveying the art of the past decade in Hungary requires an effort to understand the still enigmatic period that ended so abruptly in 1989. More autonomous and less political, art started to articulate a new vision in the relative liberalism of those years of late communism, and this vision was reflected in the focus of this exhibition.

Fifty-eight artists and artist groups were chosen by curators Péter Kovács and Márta Kovalovszky to represent the major tendencies of Hungarian art of the ’80s. In retrospect, the eclecticism of the “new arrivals” of the decade seems to have dominated the early