July 10 – September 7, 2025
Exhibition: Best of Diploma 2025 – Selection from the Best Diploma Works of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts
Free entry!
The Best of Diploma exhibition of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (HUFA) is a highlight of the academic year for Hungary’s contemporary art scene and all those interested in young, talented artists. This traditional showcase presents the diploma works of the most outstanding recent graduates. Unusually this year, the exhibition is not hosted at HUFA, but at the HAB contemporary art centre on Andrássy Avenue.
The selection features works from the university’s long-standing departments – painting, sculpture, printmaking, and intermedia – alongside cutting-edge trends in graphic design, stage design concepts, and the unique art restoration programme, which is offered exclusively at HUFA in Hungary. Also featured is the university’s newest department, Visual Arts, where students experiment with an interdisciplinary approach.
The works of the 2025 graduating class explore themes such as the ethos of a globally traumatized generation, body image, and the search for identity. The Best of Diploma exhibition offers a candid and subjective artistic response – through the tools of contemporary art – to the images and content generated by the digital world and artificial intelligence. These students transform the experience of our idealized, virtual surroundings into works of art, while also challenging the conceptual boundaries of art itself.
The HAB venue is familiar territory for HUFA graduates. The building, formerly home to KOGART, regularly showcased the university’s students’ work through the FRESH exhibition series. In addition to the Best of Diploma exhibition, this year the HAB sculpture garden will also feature sculptural works by HUFA students.
Throughout the summer, the exhibition will be accompanied by a variety of cross-disciplinary programmes, with more information to be announced soon on the official websites and social media channels of HUFA and HAB.
September 17 – November 16, 2025
Exhibition: Conversion. Radical Encounters
Free entry!
Can we live our lives radically differently? Where does the thread of our fate lead? Can we imagine living a life of a completely different quality than heretofore? HAB exhibitions most often explore themes crucial to our human condition, to humaneness, to humanity at large, which also emerge as creative causes in art. One such theme is the possibility of radical change. Amid the multiple crises of today’s world, this is more relevant than ever. Its practical significance cannot be ignored, as being under threat invariably calls for a radical turn in our lives. At the same time, practical change is always accompanied by spiritual and psychological work, and these processes may set in motion a fundamental transformation, while the very basis of our existence may be called into question.
The HAB exhibition Conversion. Radical Encounters explores this change of heart, this volte-face, by presenting a variety of genres, media, perspectives, and attitudes. The material divided into separate sections draws on works by both Old Masters and young contemporary artists, including such superstars as Turner Prize-winner Mark Wallinger, Berndnaut Smilde or Keith Milow. Ostensibly, a common feature of the works is that very few of them represent the experience of conversion; they predominantly invite the viewer to contribute to the work with an active agency.
The insight that we take away from this exhibition may be that a turn of fate is only possible if we let go of the world as we have conceived of it. A turn of fate is therefore a kind of conversion. Not necessarily (or not only) to a specific Judeo-Christian god, nor to a Dionysian archetypal figure of sanctity, nor even to a hollow and abstract transcendence. We arrive at our unveiled truth, whose reality irresistibly invades our lives and takes control of our destiny.
