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Guided tour with the curator of the exhibition, Zsófia Farkas.

INVISIBLE FACE
Portrait types and non-typical portraits
Recent times have highlighted the importance of our faces, whether we are wearing a mask or in front of a screen. The value of our personal presence has also changed. We have observed how different the image we see of ourselves through the computer camera - the image of our animate personality communicating with our environment - is from the image of our face in the mirror.
Do we create our features or does someone else construct them for us/for us? Is our face created the moment our gaze meets someone else's, or does our inner self-image define the essence of our personality?
The exhibition tries to approach these questions by presenting a selection of portraits from the collection of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, each of which is a typical type of portrait. The exhibition starts with the Jewish religion's prohibition of portraying people and continues with the expression of the Jewish self-image in relation to religion and tradition. These works are followed by self-portraits by twentieth-century artists: these portraits show an assimilated, bourgeois-looking, self-conscious artist in search of modernity, and often include the painter's studio. The third group of images shows the possibilities of hiding the face through enigmatic self-portraits by female artists: alienated self-portraits, masks, roles or the schematisation of the face. The final section will introduce a less visible genre, the death mask. This is the most ancient form of facial representation, the mask, which seeks both to capture the lifelike features of the dead and to capture the character of the deceased in an eternal ideal.
Who do these works represent, what self-image do they convey of individuals and communities? The inexhaustible theme of the portrait, the Invisible Face exhibition seeks to approach it from the perspective of how the works represent the traditions, tensions, complexities or lack of identity of Jewish identity.
The artists in the exhibition:
Aba-Novák Vilmos, Anna Margit, Bálint Endre, Bihari Sándor, Bokros Birman Dezső, Csabai Ékes Lajos, Diener Dénes Rudolf, Erdei Viktor, Földes Lenke, Gedő Lipót, Gera Éva, Gombos Lilly, Gráber Margit, Herman Lipót, Kádár Béla, Kaufmann Izidor, Kornitzer Béla, E. M. Lilien, Abel Pann, Perlmutter Izsák, Perlott Csaba Vilmos, Róna József, Sajó Edit, Scheiber Hugó, Szentgyörgyi István, Tihanyi Lajos, Zádor István, Vörös Géza

On view from 7 October to 23 November 2022, Mon-Fri from 14:00 to 18:00.