Dr Loránd Bereczky’s speech at the exhibition opening ceremony of the Historical Museum in Salgótarján

These days it is extremely exciting if an art colony can survive for 10 years in a world where self-realization is a trend, even at other people’s expense. The artist community is extremely sensitive, which is why it is a miracle that, year by year, this art colony can give birth to high-quality exhibitions expressing collective harmony.

Our artists’ pieces show that the myth of creation and production, the joint creative process connects artists. And the goal connects them, creating sight along the values that complete our everyday life.

I hope that the Cered International Art Colony will survive and prosper for a long time!

If such pieces can be born in this place, it is obvious that, for the participants, the question is not what the others are doing, but how they can create something that their colleagues will like.

Cered proves that modernity does not exist for itself; it is not for the artist to fit into a given moment in history or to copy global trends.

Those who work in Cered can define their own message with a tool that makes their piece of art exciting and full of fantasy by pushing the genre’s limits. This is the most an artist can do.

Every year the artists of the art colony leave a piece for the collection. In a hundred years, this collection will attest that there was a company which, by living and working together and learning from and helping each other, was able to give birth to artworks that somehow made our everyday life remind us of human life. Believe me, where meaningful human activity goes on, there is no way to live without culture, and art plays a huge part in creating this culture and its differentiation. We know that the conceptual system of the world is moving towards a visual system where messages about the norms of behavior and subsistence are mediated by visual tools and signs. We have to understand these signs and interpret them. The most successful and beautiful part of the learning process is when we meet an unconventional artwork. An encounter like this is worth more than a hundred explanations.

Please learn more about the Art Colony of Cered and its founding members. Appreciate its activity, which can be an example for the whole of Europe.

Dr Loránd Bereczky
General Director
Hungarian National Gallery