MissionArt Gallery would like to celebrate Hungary’s accession to the European Union with a special series of exhibitions in conjunction with other galleries and institutions that are to host this traveling exhibition at a later date. The invited artists representing the elite of contemporary Hungarian art submitted three A4 sized pieces of work of theirs with a theme of their own choosing. This body of work will be extended to include pieces by fellow artists from a variety of locations and will adorn the walls of exhibition halls in larger European cities, creating a frieze tens of meters in size. As this exhibition travels to increasingly new locations, its content will be enriched and its internationalism broadened.
This friendly international artists-frieze, where everybody is the “same” and where everyone is close to each other, aims to celebrate the enlargement of the European Union. It is not constrained to the limits of a theme driven exhibition. Coming together in itself stands as a symbol for communal spirit. It is a playful coincidence that the substance of the exhibition is the same as the slogan of the European Union: UNITY IN DIVERSITY.
The first exhibition opened in Budapest in 2003 then in Vienna in March, and in Bratislava in October of 2004. The frieze was in Paris and Stuttgart in the spring and subsequently Berlin from July to September in 2005. In Berlin 100 artist’s 300 works participated in this frieze from several countries.
The next exhibitions will be in Rome in February of 2006 (at the Accademia d’Ungheria In Roma). At present, we are negotiating with London, Lille, Barcelona, Stockholm, Luxemburg, and Helsinki. The idea of the exhibition met overwhelming interest in Vienna, Bratislava, Paris, and Stuttgart. All of the artists we reached accepted our invitation. Moreover, we have received increasingly new contributions. The extended frieze, which is expected to reach the length of a hundred meters, will be finally exhibited in Budapest and Brussels in 2006.
MissionArt Gallery and Reflex Business Services concluded a sponsorship agreement in the summer of 2005. By this agreement Reflex prepares and hosts the Europe Frieze website, free of charge. Moreover, Reflex is also responsible to registering and forwarding the purchase bids submitted for the artworks to MissionArt via the Internet.