Labyrinth - Lili Ország and her fellow artists

The art exhibition, divided into two rooms, features selections from the Vasilescu collection, which is housed at Rómer Flóris Museum in Győr. János Vasilescu (1923-2006) was of Romanian origin and settled in Hungary through marriage. He was an engineer, enterpreneur, and inventor who amassed a private collection of several hundred pieces, which he began to build in the 1950s and which was greatly enriched by his acquaintance with painter and graphic artist Lili Ország (1926-1978).

Her paintings form the backbone of the collection. The art collector immediately became an admirer of her works, and with her help, he got to know the artists the most significant representatives of contemporary Hungarian fine arts, whose high-quality works elevated the collection to the ranks of the best private collections in the country. Thanks to Vasilescu's generous gesture, the Ország Lili collection was transferred to the Hungarian state and several public collections. He left his own collection to the city of Győr with the aim of keeping it together and making it accessible.

We borrowed the works presented in the exhibition from the museum in Győr. Our first room is dedicated exclusively to Lili Ország's works. János Vasilescu's collection provides a comprehensive picture of Lili Ország's secretive, unclassifiable, and unique life's work. It guides us through her early visual language, influenced by Magritte and Chirico, through surrealistic paintings, to the iconic images she painted after her trip to Bulgaria (1957-1959). From iconic images to works influenced by her trip to Prague, inspired by the Jewish graveyard there. Her works featuring Hebrew characters preserve the appearance of the ruins of Rome, Naples, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, as well as city walls, floor plans, ancient statue fragments, and paintings, as well as the Labyrinth series (1973-1978), which can be interpreted as a summary of her life's work, as a personal life journey through the ancient myth into a labyrinth of personal life, translating it into the present. The visual world quickly broke away from realistic perception, giving way to meticulously constructed, non-figurative works in which memories of the past, fragments of vanished civilizations, meaningless letters, fragments of text, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Coptic, Aramaic, Roman, Hebrew symbols, gates opening onto empty spaces, walls, mirrors, stone cables, documents are featured – all
testimonies, mementos of the memory that creates timelessness.

In János Vasilescu's private collection, alongside Lili's paintings, a significant place is occupied by those artists, prominent figures in contemporary Hungarian fine art, whom the art collector discovered among the painter's acquaintances. In this way, Lili Ország set the direction for the systematic expansion of the collection. The impressive collection was assembled in a short period of time, during the art collector's lifetime, from the proceeds of his successful ventures, technical patents, and inventions. His passion for collecting, which went beyond business and commercial considerations, aspired to create a consciously constructed, coherent collection of 20th-century artworks that reflected his own taste. The main motivation behind the collection was personal connections and friendships with the artists. The art collector emphasized the personal nature of the collection, which he considered more important than its size. He knew all 27 artists from whom he purchased works personally. Their works are displayed in the second room.

Vasilescu's collection includes works by Lili Ország's contemporaries and fellow artists, including Erzsébet Schaár, Tibor Vilt, Tamás Vígh, Béla Kondor, Ilona Keserü, Pál Deim, Dóra Maurer, Tamás Hencze, István Nádler. Lili Ország drew the collector's attention to the suppressed, progressive circle of artists belonging to the European School, who also found refuge in the Hungarian State Puppet Theater in the 1950s: Endre Bálint, Dezső Korniss, Margit Anna, Tihamér Gyarmathy, and Ferenc Martyn. Lili Ország, who met Endre Bálint here in 1953, considered him her master throughout her entire life. The collection includes exceptionally valuable works by masters of the Hungarian avant-garde and European masters such as Lajos Kassák, László Moholy-Nagy, János Mattis-Teutsch, Sándor Bortnyik, Márk Vedres, Jenő Kerényi, as well as Victor Vasarely, Amerigo Tot, and Pierre Székely, who were active on the international scene. Among the high-quality works, we find many rarities, curiosities, representing the diverse trends of the century from constructivism to neoclassicism, from gestural painting to op art.