The group exhibition Creation-Works presents contemporary Hungarian artists from various areas of the visual arts for whom an interest in their own creative process and the desire to document this process plays a special role in their work. The works on display here are not merely counter-examples of spontaneous creativity; the exhibition presents the labour of creation, which takes form as individual works of art. These works are open not only because of the boundless possibilities of interpretation: definitions of the phrase creative process supplied by the participating artists shed light on the arbitrariness of ‘plucking’ the ‘finished’ artwork from the various stages of the process, much as the beginning and the end of the creative process itself escapes definition.

Márta Czene

Night-time, 2015, acrylic on wood, 70 × 144 cm

The exhibition does not seek to offer an unfiltered insider’s glance into an artist’s creative process in order to satisfy the Romantic yearning to find the origins of a work of art. The artists participating in the exhibition regard their creative process not merely as a sequence of decisions, but as a work of art itself, believing that sometimes the preparatory stages are more important than the final work and the beauty of the process is more exciting than the result.

Endre Koronczi

Ploubuter Park, 2014, video, ca 50 min

This creative attitude finds expression in a diverse array of forms in the exhibition, including sketchbooks, blogs, photographic and video documentation, and verbal analyses. Various sub-categories emerge within the selection. Several artists examine the space, the studio in which they work, almost as if they were outsiders. Some use the walls of the gallery as a workspace, others as a visual diary. Those for whom the role of the artist-as-supervisor has a special significance form a distinct category, drawing attention to how an artist can manipulate the documentation, thereby deceiving the viewer as well as him/herself. A book assembled from a series of photographs or digital graphics posted on a blog as a kind of visual diary appear as the contemporary equivalents of the sketchbooks of previous centuries. One artist reflects on the creative process of another, and — as if “reliving” the creation in the hopes of possibly deciphering someone else’s technique or working method — he reconstructs one of the artist’s works.