György Galántai who offered this exhibition a space twenty years ago as the organizer of the Balatonboglár Chapel Exhibitions (under police observation, prone to continuous harassment by the authorities),and who in the meantime managed to develop the underground institution which meantime managed to develop the underground institution which he had founded into an alternative archives, and who, now can open a real art center in the city with the generous support of the Budapest Municipal Council.

Comparing then with now seems only natural. The exhibition material which used to be considered as relative, would, beyond doubt, seem meager today if Galántai had not constructed an installation of an artistic standard to it. However, its documentary value lends it a symbolic force even today, as the symbol of the incredible network of connections that has bound the members of the Hungarian avant-garde together with their colleagues abroad for twenty years. Conceptual and Mail Art flourished, artists who, in the meantime have become great stars of the international artistic life did not shrink from sending their creations to people behind the iron curtain completely unknown to them, and also "laymen" in great numbers participated in the exhibitions at Balatonboglár. It was all because we agreed on the fact that everybody is an artist. Almost everything has changed by now, except, perhaps. The concept that gave rise to Artpool. We want to continue preserving its marginal character, to collect, process and present all the non-commercial and non monumental branches of art of the present and recent past from Conceptual to Copy Art, and beyond.

Finally, the theme, the mirror had its own individual symbolic force, and it still has one today. The decisive impetus to collect mirror works was given to me by the realization as an art historian that there had never existed an artist who wouldn't have been at one point or other enchanted by the mirror. As an enthusiastic supporter of Conceptual Art however, I realized that this was the trend which had undertaken the role of artistic self-examination. And self-examination simply does not exist without a mirror.

Art has dramatically changed recently. And so has the way of thinking of the author of these lines. Old and new mirror-works have emerged by the thousand. Perhaps it would not even be worthwhile to organize them into an exhibition, just a book. The need for self-examination, however, is a living demand.

Artpool would like to become a center suitable for self-examination for Hungarian and international art, and to do a lot of other things on the side.