“Two color forms, always in contrast with one another, provide the plastic unity—that is, the basic unit of the work: the duality of everything finally accepted as belonging together.”
Victor Vasarely
“If we were to take the Rembrandts from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and move them across the street, announcing that there’s a Rembrandt exhibition, people would flock there in droves.”
Wilhelm Waetzoldt
The temporary exhibition, opening in January 2026, does not present Victor Vasarely’s oeuvre in chronological order; instead, it features a selection of his well-known, popular, and emblematic works and formal series, arranged within the spacious exhibition halls of the JPM Modern Hungarian Art Gallery. This curatorial approach is justified by the fact that the artist’s various periods do not represent chronologically successive stages, but rather groups of works—parallel “families of works”—to which he returned throughout every phase of his career. At this exhibition, the public can encounter numerous works that have not yet been displayed in the permanent exhibition of the JPM Vasarely Museum at 3 Káptalan Street. In addition to significant acrylic paintings, tapestries, reliefs, and multiples, we are now presenting the complete series of silkscreen prints from the VEGA, XICO, RESPONSES, and GORDES albums. On display in a separate room—accompanied by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – all the works from Victor Vasarely’s BACH album, together with op-art portraits of the composer by his son, Jean Pierre Yvaral, as a unique interpretation of the relationship between music and the visual arts, a tradition in Pécs represented by the art of Ferenc Lantos and the Martyn Ferenc Free School he founded.
The exhibition “Plastic Units and Codable Textures – Victor Vasarely” at the JPM Modern Hungarian Art Gallery is open until March 22, 2026, Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The exhibition was curated by András Nagy, Head of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the JPM.
