Boglár 50 – The Chapel Studio of György Galántai in Balatonboglár 1970–1973
The Balatonboglár Chapel Studio, started and run by artist György Galántai operated between 1970 and 1973 as a unique cultural venue of progressive fine art, underground theatre, poetry and film in Hungary. The chapel, owned by the Catholic Church, was abandoned and desecrated when Galántai rented it, and then made it suitable for use and operated it as an art space.
Galántai’s four-year project provided answers to the question of what the contemporary Hungarian culture of the time was capable of once the infrastructural background and the intellectual autonomy required by art are in place. In the context of communism in the seventies, this experiment represented freedom from the prevailing ideological and aesthetic constraints as well as from the censorship of the day. This atmosphere of freedom inspired numerous significant (fine art) exhibitions and other art events. After the years of fighting for legal operation, the chapel studio was forced to an abrupt end at the apex of its activity due to police action, but the programme that was realised there is nevertheless remembered as the most important series of events in the history of the Hungarian neo-Avantgarde.
The significance of the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio was first recognised around 2003 with the chronological summary of the events in the volume titled Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970-1973 / Illegal Avantgarde. The Chapel Studio of György Galántai in Balatonboglár (edited by Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári, Artpool-Balassi, 2003). It transpires from the book that many emblematic works, which play an important role in the art history of Hungary and the Central Eastern European region, were made in Balatonboglár, and the artists who exhibited there – including Imre Bak, György Jovánovics, Dóra Maurer, Miklós Erdély, Tamás Szentjóby, Gyula Pauer, Katalin Ladik, János Major as well as members of the Squat Theatre and the Pécs Workshop – are now internationally renowned figures represented in the collections of canon-shaping museums. Amidst the severe restrictions imposed on international relations by the Kádár regime the programme of the Chapel Studio provided the framework for collaboration with the artists of the region’s other countries, thus meetings between Czech, Slovakian and Hungarian artists took place, as well as an exhibition of works by Yugoslavian (Novi Sad) artists. During the year numerous exhibitions and publications focused on the Boglár events, and nowadays the Boglár Chapel Studio is a metaphor for the Hungarian neo-Avantgarde, especially in international literature.
Within the framework of the Unexpected Culture project, financed by the Veszprém–Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture, several events are devoted to the four-year operation of the Chapel Studio and evoke its events, while taking a fresh approach to its discussion and interpretation, using works and documents collected by György Galántai, which are preserved in the Artpool Art Research Center, as well as memories documented by him in hundreds of photographs and slides, which are also viewable online at artpool.hu.
Boglár 50 events in 2023
25 April - 28 June 2023
50 YEARS OF REMEMBRANCE / BASIC DIFFERENCES
Curator: György Galántai
Venue: Artpool Art Research Center (Central European Research Instutute for Art History / KEMKI) - chamber exhibition
10 June - 24 August 2023
Boglár Here and Now – The Chapel Studio of György Galántai in Balatonboglári 1970-1973
Curator: József Mélyi, Curator assistant: Zsófia Kergyó
Venue: Vaszary Galéria, Balatonfüred
info on Hello VEB (in Hungarian)
21–30 July 2023
CULTURE HILL IN THE CULTURE VALLEY
(an exhibition commemorating the events and the aspirations of the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio 50 years ago)
Curator: Galántai György
Venue: Area 51, Kapolcs (Kossuth u. 51) and Galántai House (Kossuth u. 53.)
Artpool's alternative art presence at the Valley of Arts Festival
August - October 2023
Performative archives - Boglár ’50
Curators: Gabriella Schuller and László Százados
Participants: Bence György Pálinkás and Eszter Kállay, Kristóf Kelemen, Hajnal Németh
Venue: Balatonboglár, Chapel Hill
Illegal Avantgarde. The Chapel Studio of György Galántai in Balatonboglár 1970–1973