The Hungarian National Gallery, the country’s largest public collection dedicated to the evolution of Hungarian visual art, rolls into 2026 with a packed calendar. Expect major exhibitions, multilingual tours, festivals, concerts, family days, and hands-on workshops. Kids get their share too, with creative clubs, art education sessions, and summer camps—all inside one of Budapest’s most iconic cultural spaces.
Lajos Tihanyi Takes Center Stage
This winter belongs to Lajos Tihanyi (Tihanyi Lajos). Marking the 140th anniversary of the avant-garde painter’s birth, the Gallery launches a special retrospective that brings together his key paintings, graphics, and personal objects. Having lost his hearing as a child, Tihanyi forged a striking visual language from silence—without academic training—and became a defining figure of The Eight (Nyolcak) and 20th-century Hungarian painting.
Guided tours titled Rebellious Forms, Bold Colors – The Art of Lajos Tihanyi run repeatedly: January 17, 18, 23, 25 (with sign-language interpretation), 29, and 31, inviting visitors to dive deeper into his color worlds, tonal structures, and restless forms.
Kids Become Art Sleuths
The Gallery’s hit creative club, Color It Anew! – Museum Workshop for Kids, turns January into a mystery hunt across the museum’s halls. On January 14, 21, and 28, young detectives chase clues hidden in dozens of Tihanyi pieces, assembling a final picture as the puzzle clicks into place. Along the way, they make fake paintings, craft composite “phantom images,” and experiment with photo manipulation—art-making as detective work, and detective work as art.
For Parents and Toddlers
Mama, Look! – Silence Speaks (January 15 and 29) spotlights how Tihanyi’s childhood deafness shaped a vision that turned limitation into artistic power. For the tiniest culture lovers, Toddlers – Snowflake Dance (January 27) invites families to bundle up for a winter-themed adventure through the Gallery—songs, stories, and snowy dances included as children discover what colors hide in a white landscape.
Curators, Historians, and Writers Lead the Way
TIHANYI 140: Curator Mariann Gergely leads a tour on January 15 through an artist whose works were known mostly via black-and-white reproductions in Hungary until the 1970s. His estate made a dramatic journey from Paris into the Gallery’s collection 55 years ago—now presented in vivid color.
Art historian Gergely Barki heads two events: The Person Behind the Palette (January 16), an unconventional tour through the Tihanyi show, and a lecture on January 24, Two or None: Doublings and Hiatuses in Lajos Tihanyi’s Oeuvre, exploring repetitions, gaps, and the structural rhythm of the artist’s career.
Writer and art historian Rita Halász guides two personal tours under the title Embroidered in Concrete on January 17 and 31, bringing a writer’s lens to Tihanyi’s forms, textures, and urban sensibility.
Italy Meets Hungary
On January 16, Visita guidata in italiano offers Italian speakers a curated sweep through the greatest hits of Hungarian art from the Middle Ages to today, with special attention to the 19th and 20th centuries—and a playful hint that you might even bump into Dante among the canvases.
Abstract Adventures
Create! – Abstract Experience Painting on January 17 charts the freedom of abstraction—from geometric rigor to loose brushwork—after a gallery walk featuring major figures such as Sean Scully, Judit Reigl, and Simon Hantaï (Hantai Simon). Afterward, participants paint their own striking abstract works, channeling rhythm, color, and form.
Body, Time, Ideal
Nude Sculptures from the Turn of the Century (January 18) examines one of art history’s oldest subjects—the nude—across painting and sculpture. The guided tour traces how ideals change with the era while the human body remains a constant touchstone for artists seeking truth, beauty, and tension in form.
Fitness for the Mind
Mental Fitness – New Year, New Style (January 21) puts stylistic shifts under the microscope. Artists like János Vaszary, József Rippl-Rónai, and Aurél Bernáth changed styles across their careers, sometimes so dramatically you wouldn’t guess the works were by the same hand. After a gallery walk, participants workshop in the studio, trying on one of Rippl-Rónai’s styles to see how transformation feels on the brush.
Online and Accessible
An online guided tour of the Tihanyi exhibition (January 22) lets you tune in from home—an easy way to celebrate the Day of Hungarian Culture while exploring a modern master’s legacy. On January 25, the Tihanyi tour is offered with sign-language interpretation, opening the show’s visual language to an even wider audience.
Family-Focused Sundays
Adventure in the Gallery – Unusual Faces on January 24 features two age-tailored tours: 10:30–11:15 for kids aged 6–9, and 11:30–12:15 for ages 10–13. It’s face time with portraiture that tilts toward the curious, the expressive, and the delightfully odd.
What’s Next
On February 1, a scheduled guided tour turns to The Eight (Nyolcak), the trailblazing group that cemented Tihanyi’s place in Hungarian modernism. It’s the logical sequel to the anniversary retrospective—expanding the frame from one voice to a chorus that reshaped a nation’s art.
Budapest’s Hungarian National Gallery is making January a feast of discovery, with events for every age and energy level. Whether you’re sleuthing with the kids, diving deep with curators, dancing with snowflakes, or painting your own abstract world, the halls of Buda Castle are buzzing.
