The Hungarian National Gallery, Hungary’s largest public collection documenting the birth and evolution of the country’s visual arts, flips the calendar to a busy January with standout exhibitions, themed tours in multiple languages, workshops, family days, festivals, and concerts. Kids get their own creative clubs, art education sessions, and summer camps, while grown‑ups can dive deep into painting, sculpture, and the stories behind them—all in the soaring spaces of Buda Castle.
Tihanyi 140: Bold Color, Rebellious Form
The headline event this month is a special career-spanning show marking the 140th anniversary of Lajos Tihanyi’s birth. It gathers the artist’s key paintings, graphic works, and personal objects, offering an intimate look at a life lived in art—and silence. Tihanyi lost his hearing in childhood and forged a singular voice through painting, conjuring colors and forms from the quiet. He never studied at an academy, yet he built an extraordinary visual language that made him one of the most original figures in The Eight (Nyolcak) artists’ group and in 20th‑century Hungarian painting. Visitors can join guided tours of the exhibition throughout the month, including accessible sessions with sign-language interpretation.
Light, Life, and Everyday Grace: Adolf Fényes
A separate program steps into the luminous world of Adolf Fényes, where sunlight reaches even the humblest interiors, markets bustle with storybook vitality, and ordinary life holds the weight of history. As viewers roam his quiet landscapes and intimate rooms from the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the tour explores how a peasant courtyard could exist under the shadow of French Impressionism, what a Szolnok (Szolnok) veranda shares with Paris, and what these century-old genre scenes whisper about people’s simple joys and sorrows.
For the Smallest Visitors: Snowflake Dance
Tiny museumgoers get a winter wonderland with Tipegők – Hópihe tánc. Pack the coziest mittens and warmest snow boots: in this playful exploration, the forest turns white, the snowy landscape reveals unexpected colors, and everyone sings, tells stories, and dances with snowflakes. Sessions return later in the month, keeping the magic going.
Color It Again! Kids’ Detective Workshop
January’s Color It Again! workshops transform the Gallery into a mystery to crack. Only the sharpest little detectives need apply. Following the trail of a great painter—yes, Tihanyi again—kids examine dozens of works and hunt for every hidden detail that matters. If they piece the clues together, the big picture emerges and the puzzle is solved. Creation is part of the sleuthing: participants “forge” paintings, build composite sketches, and experiment with photo manipulation.
Mama, Look! When Silence Speaks
Tihanyi’s childhood illness and resulting deafness shaped a radically individual path through the avant‑garde. In Mama, Look! – Silence Speaks, parents and children explore how a seeming disadvantage became a unique artistic power, and how Tihanyi’s life story reframes the way we see his work.
Curator and Guest-Led Tours
A fresh angle on Tihanyi’s legacy arrives with curator Mariann Gergely’s guided tour of TIHANYI 140. For decades, until the 1970s, Hungarian audiences knew Tihanyi largely through black‑and‑white reproductions. His estate reached the National Gallery 55 years ago, journeying from Paris under dramatic circumstances—now unpacked in the galleries. Art historian Gergely Barki leads The Person Behind the Palette, an offbeat walkthrough of the show, and returns with a lecture, Double or None: Doublings and Hiatuses in Lajos Tihanyi’s Oeuvre, mapping gaps, twin works, and the riddles they leave behind. Writer and art historian Rita Halász also offers a subjective tour, Embroidered in Concrete (Betonba hímezve), threading literature and visual art.
Italian-Language Tour
Italy meets Buda with an Italian-language guided visit spanning Hungarian art from the Middle Ages to today, spotlighting the 19th and 20th centuries. Expect a greatest-hits route through movements and masters—and the chance to bump into Dante among the paintings.
Abstract Adventures
In January’s Create! – Abstract Experience Painting, imagination rules. The program parses the play of color and form, from crisp geometry to freewheeling brushwork. After a gallery walk featuring heavyweights like Sean Scully, Judit Reigl, and Simon Hantaï, participants paint their own striking abstract canvases.
Nudes at the Turn of the Century
The nude—one of art’s oldest subjects—gets a fresh look in a guided tour of the renewed exhibition on 19th–20th‑century nude sculpture. The human body is constant, but representation changes with each era’s ideals; the walkthrough traces those shifting visions in bronze, stone, and beyond.
Mind Fitness: New Year, New Style
Mind Fitness takes New Year’s resolutions into the studio. The focus is on artists’ stylistic pivots—how creators like János Vaszary, József Rippl-Rónai, and Aurél Bernáth reinvented themselves, sometimes so completely you’d never guess two paintings came from the same hand. After a gallery tour, the workshop riffs on one of Rippl-Rónai’s styles in hands‑on making.
Online Access and Family Days
You can also tour TIHANYI 140 from home, with an online guided visit timed to the Day of Hungarian Culture. Families shouldn’t miss Adventure at the Gallery – Strange Faces: tailored tours for ages 6–9 and 10–13 explore expressive portraiture and the stories faces tell.
Inclusive and Ongoing
January ends as it began—immersed in Tihanyi’s rebellious forms and bold colors. There’s a sign-language‑interpreted tour of the anniversary show, more kids’ detective workshops, and repeat sessions of Snowflake Dance. Across it all, the Gallery’s mix of scholarship, play, and accessibility turns Budapest’s winter gray into a deep, surprising palette.
