Systems of Logic / Logic of Systems: The Art of Agnes Denes

The Hungarian-born American artist Agnes Denes (1931) gained international acclaim in the 1960s with her multifaceted artistic practice built on the mutual interconnections between science and art. Her artworks fuses diverse media, she was among the first to incorporate the ecological approach into art, utilising mathematics, philosophy, ecology, sociology, and psychology. Her conceptually rooted art links the genres of land art and environmental art as it is to poetry and philosophy, printmaking and installation art. . In the early 1970s Denes coined the term ＂Eco-Logic＂, referring to the twin pillars sustaining her complex notion of art, the pairing of ecology and logic. Her environment-conscious public artworks represent radical interventions in the fabric of the landscape or the urban environment. Agnes Denes intends her works as messages addressed to the generations, indeed the civilisations of the future. In the light of our current ecological and climate crisis, her projects and messages could not be more relevant. The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest presents the most significant themes and projects from Agnes Denes’s extraordinary oeuvre within a chronological framework.

Rona Kopeczky is a curator and art historian based in Budapest. She was a curator for international art in Ludwig Museum Budapest between 2006 and 2015. Her focus is artists from the Central Eastern European region. She holds a PhD in art history from the Paris IV - Sorbonne University.