Radical avant-garde art from central and east Europe gets rebirth at London gallery

A new exhibition featuring avant-garde artworks made by eastern and central European artists during the Cold War will open this month at London’s private members bar The Arts Club. Displacements: Avant-Garde Eastern and Central European art from the Cold War Period opens on 12 September and will feature a range of radical paintings and photography by artists from Poland, Hungary, former Yugoslavia and former Czechoslovakia, whose work was previously overlooked in the west.

Among the artists to be exhibited at Dover Street are Hungarian-born Imre Bak, Croatian graphic artist Boris Bućan and Slovak artist Július Koller. The exhibition aims to give a voice to the pioneering artistic methods the artists developed across action-art, painting and photography.

Despite economic and political obstacles, they shunned traditional artistic trends of the time, instead carving out their own anti-art movements and graphic art collectives where they were free to form new artistic practices. They developed a radical visual language which incorporated bold abstract forms and experimental photography — evidence of the conceptual art which underpinned their artistic journeys.

Although the specific socio-political contexts in which all of the artists lived varied among them, all of them shared a living environment marked by Soviet dominance and economic difficulties, themes that tie the works together.

Displacements: Avant-Garde Eastern and Central European art from the Cold War Period at The Arts Club, London, opens 12 September 2016. Wed & Sat, 10am-12pm, by appointment only.