The Hungarian National Gallery, the country’s largest public fine arts collection, charts the birth and evolution of Hungarian art with heavyweight permanent and temporary exhibitions, multilingual guided tours, themed programs, family days, festivals, and concerts. Kids get hands-on too with creative clubs, art education workshops, and summer camps designed to spark curiosity and confidence.
Lajos Tihanyi Takes Center Stage
December closes and January opens with a sweeping tribute: Rebel Forms, Daring Colors – The Art of Lajos Tihanyi marks the artist’s 140th birth anniversary with a special career-spanning show. Visitors can dive into key paintings, graphic works, and personal objects. Tihanyi lost his hearing in childhood, conjuring color and form out of silence and finding a distinctive voice in the language of painting. Without academic training, he forged a singular visual idiom that made him a pillar of the Nyolcak (The Eight) group and one of the most original figures in 20th-century Hungarian art.
Dates: 2025.12.27., 12.28., 12.29., 12.30., then returning 2026.01.09., 01.11., 01.17. in Budapest. Several guided tours accompany the exhibition, encouraging visitors to “see the show with a guide and learn more about Tihanyi’s painting.”
From Crypt to Dome: Architecture Walk
On 2026.01.03., the Building Walk – From the Crypt to the Dome opens the hidden corners of the former royal palace, home to the Gallery. Expect the Habsburg Palatine Crypt, the panorama-rich dome, and other architectural highlights, all while tracing the institution’s story and collection. Budapest becomes a playground for architecture lovers in one immersive sweep through history and space.
Hands-On Adventures for Kids
The Recolor It! museum workshop for kids runs throughout January with a detective twist. On 2026.01.07., 01.14., and 01.21. in Budapest, young sleuths chase Tihanyi’s secrets: they scrutinize dozens of works, hunt down hidden details, and piece together a mystery. Creativity fuels the investigation—participants “forge” paintings, build composite portraits, and experiment with photo manipulation. It’s play, inquiry, and art-making rolled into one.
Parent-and-Child Moments
On 2026.01.08., Look at That, Mom! – Sunny Days guides families through Pictures of Tranquillity, pairing works by Adolf Fényes (1867–1945) with selections from the permanent collection. And on 2026.01.15., Mama, Look! – Silence Speaks explores how Tihanyi’s childhood illness and resulting deafness shaped a deeply individual artistic path—how a perceived disadvantage turned into an extraordinary strength and a unique vision.
Italian-Language Tour
Also on 2026.01.09., Visita guidata in italiano invites Italian speakers to discover key masterpieces of Hungarian art from the Middle Ages to today, with a special focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. There’s even a playful promise: among the canvases, you might run into Dante.
Adolf Fényes: Light and Life
On 2026.01.10., The Art of Adolf Fényes offers a warm, humanistic window onto the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. Sunlight floods even the simplest interiors, market scenes pulse with storybook vitality, and the everyday becomes as important as any historical tableau. The tour wanders through quiet moments and intimate settings, touching on how a peasant courtyard can converse with French Impressionism, how a veranda in Szolnok could echo Paris, and what these century-old genre scenes reveal about ordinary joys and sorrows.
Curators, Historians, Writers
On 2026.01.15., TIHANYI 140 features a guided tour by curator Mariann Gergely. For decades, Hungarians knew Tihanyi’s works mostly via black-and-white reproductions; fifty-five years ago, his estate made a dramatic journey from Paris into the Gallery’s collection. On 2026.01.16., art historian Gergely Barki leads The Person Behind the Palette inside the TIHANYI 140 exhibition, promising a fresh angle on the artist. And on 2026.01.17., writer and art historian Rita Halász presents Embroidered in Concrete, a subjective, writerly tour through the show’s themes and textures.
Make It Abstract
Art-making goes bold on 2026.01.17. with Create! – Abstract Experience Painting. After a gallery walk, participants paint their own eye-catching abstracts, guided by the spirit of giants like Sean Scully, Judit Reigl, and Simon Hantaï—artists who pushed form, color, geometry, and gesture into new realms and left an indelible imprint on abstraction.
Nudes at the Turn of the Century
On 2026.01.18., Nude Sculptures from the Turn of the Century zeroes in on one of art’s oldest themes: the nude human body. Its representation evolves with the era’s ideals, and this renewed exhibition of 19th–20th-century nude sculptures gets a guided tour that parses shifting forms, beauty standards, and cultural currents in three dimensions.
Art Gym for the New Year
On 2026.01.21., Mental Fitness – New Year, New Style spotlights artistic reinvention. Some painters—János Vaszary, József Rippl-Rónai, Aurél Bernáth—moved fluidly across styles; paintings made by the same artist in different periods can feel worlds apart. After the gallery walk, the workshop channels inspiration into practice by trying on one of Rippl-Rónai’s styles in the studio.
Tiny Dancers in Winter
Rounding out the month’s family programming, Toddlers – Snowflake Dance on 2026.01.13. bundles up for a magical winter outing. The group explores how the forest turns white and what colors flicker in snowy landscapes, then sings, tells stories, and dances with the snowflakes inside the Gallery’s warm embrace.
