The recently finished „THE BOSCH+BOSCH GROUP AND THE VOJVODINA NEO-AVANT-GARDE MOVEMENT" exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest will travel to five European cities in different countries during the next several years.
With the Bosch+Bosch group exhibitions, we are preparing a comprehensive monograph of the group which will be published as part of the exhibitions projects.
In Croatia, the exhibition will be presented at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, and we are very happy to announce INA as the sponsor of the project.
The Subotica-based Bosch+Bosch Group (1969–1976) was one of the artist collectives that started emerging across Europe and other parts of the world in the ‘60s, mostly within the music scene, but also other fields, such as the broad domain of visual arts.
The consciousness and situation awareness of the people of Subotica was rooted in the special character of the town situated in the border region, infused with multicultural identity and multilinguality. While the bourgeois attitude was still tangibly present in its art in the ‘60s – especially the impact of the “Pest School” – the emerging generation was already in quest of local traces of Hungarian activism, seeking historical resources that endeavoured to expound and elucidate the fading memory of the Dadaist “matinees” in Vojvodina. They sought local roots of art, fresh ideas leaked from the international scene to the Yugoslav scene, owing to the country’s economic, cultural and artistic openness and the boundless possibilities of intellectual networking.
Literary research also helped the mostly ethnic Hungarian members of the Bosch+Bosch Group in locally recognising the significance of Hungarian activism, predominantly Imre Bori’s epochal studies that rehabilitated the oeuvre of Lajos Kassák, who had been dismissed in Hungary. Historical research into the course of Zenithism and Yugoslav Dadaism commenced almost simultaneously in the South Slavic scene. The young artists of Subotica recognised the inevitability of the network system that had already functioned in the period of the historical avant-garde and resurfaced in the international scene in the ‘60s. Beyond the self-explanatory Southern Slavic relations – mostly with Novi Sad, Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana – they attached special importance to intellectual and physical approach towards their Hungarian like-minded contemporaries as well as their collaboration with art circles in North- and South-America – mainly utilising the benefits of mail art.
The Bosch+Bosch Group entered the scene with the claim of re-evaluation, envisioning a new type of social role for art beyond rejecting local, provincial values in all walks of life. It was a typical cosmopolitan phenomenon that idolised the idea of international (counter-)art, attempting to reform the notions of art and the artist, which had been cemented in an outdated form. Faithfully to the ideas of the avant-garde, they professed that being an artist was not a matter of status but a lifestyle and behaviour.