Arcana Collection

In the past decade, numerous institutional exhibitions in Hungary offered insight into known and lesser known private collections of contemporary and classic art. The publications and interview series that appeared in conjunction with – or independently of – these exhibitions, have uncovered the “private stories” associated with these different collections, as well as their various strategies for expansion, their imagined and real influence on shaping the Hungarian art scene and art canon, and, last but not least, the personal preferences of the collectors themselves. The Arcana Collection is a continuously expanding private Hungarian art collection that was started in 2005. Its character has been made all the more enigmatic by the fact that its prominent pieces have remained unseen by close friends and the wider public alike.

The material – which has been slow to take shape in terms of both its profile and its orientation – can be divided, as per thematic and genre-based specifications, into two units that, at times, enter into dialogue with one another. The larger of these units focuses on the medium of photography, while the other concentrates on the oeuvres of prominent figurative and abstract artists from the middle generation of Hungarian contemporary art.

András Koncz

My Hands Are Burning , 1977, photo