Hard on the heels of the Derkovits Prize summer show at the Ernst Museum, this month there are three more good opportunities to encounter the latest achievements of Hungarian art. The Műcsarnok opens its autumn season with an exhibition of the work of six contestants for a new Hungarian contemporary art competition modelled on the UK’s much-hyped Turner Prize. A jury of prominent art critics has each picked an artist under 40 with a recent major solo show under their belt as their candidate for the 5 million forint prize, with the winner to be announced in a ceremony at the closing of the exhibition. The public also has the opportunity to vote for their choice of best artist for the more modest audience prize, as part of the overall scheme to stimulate public interest in contemporary Hungarian art and its leading personalities.

The art world seems to be in two minds about the wisdom of the AVIRA award, with a lively blog debate raging about the unfairness of singling out one of the six nominated artists as being ‘5 million forints better’ than the other five, and the risk that this disproportionately rich prize will introduce a divisive spirit of greedy competition into an otherwise egalitarian artistic community. One of the six artists originally selected engineered a minor scandal by performing his rejection of the nomination in a demonstration involving the delivery of a letter of protest against ‘star making’ (see the June issue of Time Out Budapest) and the hitching of contemporary art to the branding campaign of an insurance company. Although enfant terrible Miklós Mécs has ruled himself out for the prize, favourites among the remaining candidates include the controversy-courting duo Little Warsaw, environmentally-attuned art-activist Tamás Kaszás, and the only woman on the shortlist, Emese Benczúr, known for her pithy neon signs and political embroidery.  

A few blocks away along Andrassy út, the private museum Kogart is concentrating its attention on the freshest, youngest talent with a selection of diploma works created by final year students at the neighbouring Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. The loose thematic concept for the show is ‘the look’, in the sense of both external and inner perception, as represented by the new-age style eye in the exhibition poster symbolising the piercing gaze of the curator, artist or viewer. The blurb for Fresh 2009 invites us to ‘retrain our eyes’ and be open to the ‘clash of visions’, and indeed the exhibition offers a primarily visual experience dominated by paintings and photography, with a smattering of installations from students of the more experimental Intermedia Department. At the end of the exhibition one of the 27 participating young artists will be awarded the KOGART Prize with a monetary value of approximately a quarter of the AVIRA award.

The third panorama is provided by the annual show of the Studio of Young Artists, membership of which is reserved for the under 35’s. The exhibition takes place at the Trafó Gallery and promises to be the most challenging in terms of curatorial concept and the range of artistic approaches. Curated by artist Tibor Várnagy, who has run the Liget Gáleria as a liberated zone since the 1980s, the show aims to encourage artists to explore the possibilities of working and thinking collectively. The exhibition blog that runs in parallel to the gallery show is to be used as a virtual space for the artists to become aware of each other’s work, to encourage a process of reflection, communication and mutual contextualisation. STUDIO009 is based around an alternative, cooperative model of contemporary art production, rather than a quasi-competitive structure copied from the business world, so it goes without saying that there’s no unjust prize giving at the end.