To think of a sphinx and create
Sculptor György Jovánovics
MúzeumCafé 11.
György Jovánovics, who celebrates his seventieth birthday this year, is extremely pleased that he has been able to exhibit his Relief made in the winter of 2008 together with an altarpiece panel by Sassetta, a master from Sienna. Now he has at last got the go-ahead to erect one of Europe’s largest statues. The monument Corvinus 2007 will adorn the Corvinus university’s new building. “It will be as high as eight storeys and be bigger even than the Liberty Monument on Gellért Hill. The latter is forty metres high, yet half is after all just a stone block.” Jovánovics likes many museums, including the Louvre in Paris, but his favourite is the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin. According to György Jovánovics you always have to give your maximum performance. “I’ve accomplished two things in my life that were worth living for. One is when I represented Hungary at the one-hundred-year-old Venice Biennale in 1995. The other is that my exhibition Books and Relief, a homage to the three great Hungarian constructivists, Moholy-Nagy, Kassák and Péri, held in the Fészek Gallery was taken in full by one of the world’s nicest museums, the Berlin Nationalgalerie, which is regarded as the holy of holies of the twenty-first century by all museologists, because that is the last work by the apostle of the square, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.” Jovánovics believes that such experiments make art come alive, the processes in art history become visible. “Artists are in constant dialogue with one another, even from a distance of centuries. I am sure that Sassetta would understand my relief just like Mark Rothko would be comprehended by Giotto,” he says, referring to the exhibition in Berlin where parallels between the American artist and the greatest painter of the Trecento can be discovered.