Péter Korniss: THE LONG ROAD – Sic 1967-2022

EXHIBITION OPENING
VÁRFOK GALLERY
1012 Budapest, Várfok u. 11.
Wednesday, 8th. March, 2023 at 18:30

The exhibition will be opened by: Attila Horányi, Art Historian, Art Critic
At the event Katalin Kokas, Liszt Prize-winning violinist and Barnabás Kelemen, Kossuth Prize-winning violinist will perform Bartók duets.

The Várfok Gallery is delighted to announce Péter Korniss’s latest exhibition, ’THE LONG ROAD’, which is dedicated to the central place of Korniss’s life’s work, the Transylvanian village of Sic, and includes Korniss’s newest photographs.

Péter Korniss [Cluj-Napoca, 1937], the first Kossuth Prize-winning photographer and winner of the Prima Primissima Award, is one of the most important artists of Hungarian photography. The richness, unique vision and constantly renewing nature of his unparalleled work make it of outstanding importance in the history of world photography and art. Spanning more than fifty years, Korniss’s oeuvre reveals the social changes in the Eastern European region, the irreversible effects of globalisation and the transformation of rural and village communities.

The last time Korniss’s works were shown in Hungary was in 2017 at the Hungarian National Gallery and the Várfok Gallery in Budapest, these major exhibitions were followed by key exhibitions abroad: the Romanian National Museum of Fine Arts in Bucharest, the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Rome, the Museum of Fine Arts in Cluj, the Rosphoto Photographic Museum in St Petersburg, and, in collaboration with Galerie Keller, the Hungarian Cultural Centre of the Liszt Institute in Paris.

Korniss’s ‘THE LONG ROAD’ exhibition at the Várfok Gallery combined with his latest book published by Bookart focus on the focal point of his constantly evolving career, the Transylvanian village of Sic which he first visited in 1967. In Sic, Korniss encountered the still living and rich culture of traditional village communities in many areas of the Carpathian Basin and he dedicated his career to capturing this disappearing world for future generations. Sic is thus the beginning of everything, the origin to which Korniss has been returning regularly over past decades and to which he still returns to this day. Korniss’s work in Sic, spanning fifty-five years, is the longest photographic project in the history of photography in Hungary and is outstanding on both a Hungarian and a worldwide platform.

The exhibition, ‘THE LONG ROAD — Sic 1967-2022’, at the Várfok Gallery spans Korniss’s first pictures taken in dance houses and ‘spinneries’ where peasant people, especially women, gathered to embroider or weave, to his photographs of the globalised, modernised world of today. The exhibition is exceptional as it is the first Korniss exhibition of exclusively colour photographs, the larger part of which were taken in the last two years. The exhibition is linked to and complements a beautifully produced photograph album of the same title published by Bookart which contains Korniss’s selected Sic pictures, his personal commentary and a moving foreword by the writer Attila Bartis.

The Várfok Gallery’s exhibition will also pay tribute to the memory of Mari Boldizsár of Sic, the mother of Korniss’s goddaughter, who died in 2021.

This exhibition is sponsored by the National Cultural Fund.
The exhibition is part of the Budapest Photo Festival’s official programme series.