A Puzzle of Seventy-Seven + 7 Pieces

A Puzzle of Seventy-Seven + 7 Pieces – A Selection from the Collection of the Municipal Gallery

15 May 2025 – 31 January 2026

Curated by Anikó B. Nagy and Blanka Fábián

Location: 1st floor

The Baroque corridors and small rooms furnished with period pieces—characteristic spaces of the Kiscell Museum–provide a unique backdrop for the Municipal Gallery’s latest collection-based exhibition. A Puzzle of Seventy-Seven + 7 Pieces presents 77 pieces from our own collections together with 7 artworks invited from outside, spanning a wide range of periods and genres: paintings, prints, photographs, small sculptures, as well as objects linked to social campaigns—posters, badges, and pins.

As visitors move through the museum’s winding rooms, they encounter unexpected juxtapositions of historical and contemporary artworks. The exhibition establishes thematic relations and finely woven networks between these pieces—an organizing principle that the title itself reflects: the works eventually fit together like a puzzle.

The section titled Hard Times is the core of the exhibition which explores artistic reflections on war, dictatorships, and historical traumas of the 20th and 21st centuries. Placing pro-regime and critical works side by side creates a tension in space and raises urgent questions concerning artistic responsibility, collaboration and resistance, as well as the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.

The section Labelled showcases works by artists who have faced marginalization, exclusion or rejection due to their ethnic, religious or sexual identity. In Women’s Hands, visitors find artworks that reflect on forms of labour traditionally associated with women—often invisible, undervalued or unpaid—ranging from idealizing to critical and explicitly feminist perspectives. The section Montage condenses the exhibition’s curatorial logic in essence, bringing together diverse eras and viewpoints in an associative link.

In the end we return to where we began— the section Óbuda and Kiscell, conclude the exhibition with works that depict the museum’s surroundings, through past and present lenses.

A Puzzle of Seventy-Seven + 7 Pieces does not aim to tell a single, uniform story. Instead, it offers many parallel perspectives—in the spirit of contemporary museum thinking.

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