Displacements: Avant-Garde Eastern & Central European Art

September 2016

The Arts Club is proud to present an exhibition of avant-garde art made in Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War period. The curated selection includes works by pioneering artists such as Imre Bak, Boris Bućan, Tibor Gáyor, Wojciech Fangor, Stanislav Filko, György Jovánovics, Julije Knifer, Běla Kolářová, Július Koller, Attila Kovács, Edward Krasinski, Katalin Ladik, Dóra Maurer and Henryk Stażewski providing insights into their progressive approach to a range of media including actions, painting and photography.

Giving voice to radical art being made in Poland, Hungary, former Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia, the show focuses on important artists who for a long time were overlooked in the West. These artists broke with tradition forming anti-art movements, graphic art collectives and making conceptual interventions and performance pieces. They developed new forms of artistic practice, in response to the socio-political context, with a keen intellectual awareness of art history. While the political situations of the artists in the exhibition are various, all were working within relatively restricted contexts marked by soviet dominance, changes in leadership and economic difficulties.

The Arts Club curators bring together a selection of artists from this era that have previously been passed over in the canon of art history and are gaining increased recognition internationally.