Systems of Logic / Logic of Systems: The Art and Mind of Agnes Denes

//During the holiday season the exhibitions will be open ONLY on 27 and 30 December and 2 and 3 January.//

Through a selection of the Agnes Denes’s drawings, graphic works, and photographs, this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the significant groupings of works and creative periods in her oeuvre.

Agnes Denes was born in 1931 in Budapest, moved to Sweden as a teenager with her family, and settled in the United States in the 1950s. As a young woman, she started writing poems before turning to the visual arts, although she quickly moved beyond the constraints of the traditional fine arts. Denes began a systematic visual experimentation that drew on findings from various disciplines: she reinterpreted the disciplines of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. In the 1960s, she began her analytical series Philosophical Drawings, which was followed, in the 1970s, by major series such as Pyramids and Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space – Map Projections, meticulously executed sketches and graphic works that visually represent the nature and paradoxes of human knowledge.

Agnes Denes was one of the first to integrate environmental awareness into art. In the late 1960s, she coined the concept of Eco-Logic, which referred to the two pillars of her complex artistic thinking: ecology and logic. Many of the environmental and socially conscious art movements of our time would be unthinkable without Agnes Denes’s large-scale land art projects.
The exhibition includes photographic documentation of some of the artist’s emblematic ecological works, including the 1982 action Wheatfield – A Confrontation, in which she sowed wheat in a Manhattan landfill site and later harvested the crop. The encroachment of the landscape into the New York metropolis has raised economic and social issues as well as environmental ones. Similarly groundbreaking was the community project Tree Mountain – Living Time Capsule (1982-1996), when eleven thousand trees were planted in Finland by the same number of people, based on a pattern derived from a mathematical formula. In the artist’s words, ‘there will be a reminder in the form of a strange mathematical forest for our descendants to ponder.’

Time capsules have long been a recurring element in Agnes Denes’s projects. A questionnaire on the future of humanity, compiled by the artist, is connected to the present exhibition – the responses will be buried in a time capsule during the redevelopment work on Budapest’s City Park.

In the face of today’s ecological crises, Agnes Denes’s projects and messages could not be more relevant. Her art teaches us that the global survival of humanity depends on a sustainable system of nature, human values, and knowledge.

The exhibition is curated by Mónika Kumin.

The exhibition was organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest in association with acb Gallery, Budapest.
We would like to thank for their contribution and support: Agnes Denes, Leslie Tonkonow.

Corporate partner: