Capa Center at Art Market Budapest – exhibitions

Free admission:
October 07: 11 am-7 pm
Ticketed admission:
October 08: 11 am-9 pm
October 09, 10: 11 am-7 pm
Other location: Art Market Budapest, Bálna Budapest (1093 Budapest, Fővám tér 11–12.)

BEST ROOM
A group exhibition of selected works by this year’s participants of FUTURES European Photography Platform

Curator: Emese Mucsi
Exhibiting Artists: Kincső Bede, Enikő Hodosy, Márton Mónus, Zsófia Sivák, András Zoltai
Booth: AP207

During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the best room was a privileged place within the traditional rural peasant house type. Always tidy and spotless, this room was used as a showroom for guests. The walls of the best room were adorned with the household’s artifacts, fine art objects, and ornamental articles reflecting the personal taste and economic status of the family members; and the treasured family and religious relics were also kept there. We reinterpreted this phenomenon in the context of a 21st-century trade fair situation with the exhibiting artists, while also considering the characteristics of their works that would make somebody want to have them close, own them, or be proud of them.

The BEST ROOM exhibition features the best works made by this year’s participants of FUTURES European Photography Platform. Started in 2017, FUTURES platform’s main goal is to bring attention to talented emerging photographers across Europe. Co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program, the project provides opportunities to create, exposure, and mobility for hundreds of artists selected each year by Europe’s leading art institutions.

Emese Mucsi
curator

Robert Capa: Death in the Making

Curator: Gabriella Csizek
Booth: AP201

“Over all of Spain, the sky is clear”

The installation includes Robert Capa’s images from the Master’s Set III collection housed at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, which are also featured in the book Death in the Making, published in 1938, edited by André Kertész, and dedicated to Gerda Taro.

The Spanish Civil War was a turning point in Robert Capa’s personal and professional life. His 1936 photograph knows as “The Falling Soldier” [Death of a Spanish loyalist militiaman] became a symbol of war and made him famous around the world. It was there and then that Endre Friedmann became “the greatest war photographer in the world,” and transformed into Robert Capa for good. This legendary figure was created in the spring of 1936 with his lover and fellow artist Gerta Pohorylle, who assumed the name Gerda Taro. It was also during this period that he suffered the most incomprehensible loss that would define the rest of his life: in July 1937, while he was in Paris, Gerda was killed by a Republican tank near Brunete, Spain.

The photographic book, which was published the following year, is movingly, dedicated to “Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front. And who stayed on.” It also pays tribute to other – armed and civilian – victims of the Spanish Civil War, while also demonstrating a deep commitment to democracy. The photographs and accompanying text depict the horrors of war as in defense of the democratically elected Spanish government, republican forces unite against a nationalist uprising led by General Francisco Franco. Press coverage featuring these images brought this conflict closer to the public, with its brutality and heavy civilian casualties unprecedented on European soil.

The photographs in the book and the installation, divided into sections, tell a story, or history. The history of soldiers in battle, families who have lost their homes, women left alone, children playing among the ruins, statues of saints evacuated to Barcelona… Of all.

The book: Death in the Making

In 2021, eighty-three years after the original English-language edition, Death in the Making was published for the first time in Hungarian with the title A tettenért halál as a reprint edition, courtesy of Park Kiadó/Park Publishing, in collaboration with the Capa Center. Thanks to research into the history of photography, the book now identifies the authors of all the photographs: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, as well as their friend and colleague David ‘Chim’ Seymour. The text of the book, with original captions by Robert Capa and a foreword by author Jay Allen, is complemented by a historical essay by Cynthia Young, head of the Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography.

About the Robert Capa Collection of Hungary

The so-called Master’s Set featuring Robert Capa’s lifework was assembled between 1990 and 1992 from his approximately 70,000 negatives by his younger brother Cornell and his biographer, the photo historian Richard Whelan. From these images, three series of identical enlargements were made in the 1990s, recognizable by the embossed stamp imitating Capa’s signature. Cornell Capa and Richard Whelan intended the series to contain the images that are most representative of Capa’s oeuvre, spanning his entire career from 1932 to 1954, almost from the first image to the last. With the acquisition of Master’s Set III in 2008, Budapest, along with New York and Tokyo, has become the one of the most important custodians of the Capa estate.

Art Market Budapest

Founded in 2011, Art Market Budapest is an international contemporary fine arts fair presenting a unique compilation of artists and exhibition spaces in one of Europe’s most special exhibition halls every year, Besides internationally renowned artists, the fair’s aim is to support the emerging stars of the future by providing international exposure to new galleries and young artists. Art Market Budapest has been rethinking social and geographical borders and created a new cultural region. The result of this process is the concept of young Europe which builds on fresh artistic inspirations coming from post-communist countries from the Baltic states to the Balkan, in the south from Turkey and Israel, in the east from Middle-Asian countries as much as from the new and progressive generation of artists from more developed Western countries. And what can be more engaging than a contemporary art fair that is global and local at the same time?

Tickets on Art Market Budapest