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One of the most important characteristics of artistic learning is that a significant part of its knowledge cannot be fully articulated. It cannot be written down as rules, fixed into methodologies, or transmitted solely in the form of instructions. In the visual arts, the decisive part of learning operates as implicit knowledge: a constellation of experiences, sensitivities, and decision – making mechanisms that can only take shape through practice, – through shared time, and the distribution of attention.
Michael Polanyi describes implicit knowledge as something we ‘“know, but cannot fully put into words’.” This knowledge is not contained in the stated curriculum, but in gestures, emphases, the rhythm of feedback, and the quality of questions. In this sense, the master-student relationship is not the transmission of knowledge, but a space in which a way of seeing is learned. Within the tradition of visual art education, the figure of the master is not primarily an authority, but a point of orientation. Their presence does not close things down; it opens them up: instead of providing ready-made answers, they teach one to live with uncertainty. Some thinkers argue that seeing is not passive reception but an active relationship to the world – the artist does not paint what they see, but how the world becomes visible to them. Learning this ‘“how’” cannot be taught directly; it can only be experienced, absorbed, and then rethought.
Through the relationship between three masters and three students, this exhibition examines thisat complex, multilayered process. It is not concerned with stylistic similarities or formal echoes, but with the invisible knowledge at work behind the artworks. Here, inheritance is not imitation but transformation: the received perspective is no longer present in the student’s work as a memory, but as an active material. The students presented in the exhibition were selected by their masters – not on the basis of representational criteria, but through the recognition that in them they see the continued life and transformation of the artistic approach they once developed.
We rarely speak openly about hierarchies, so the spatial arrangement is best read in the same way: not as a value ranking, but as a dramaturgy composed for dialogue.
In Hall 1 the masters’ works appear alongside fragments of text. These thoughts are not technical descriptions, but fragments of life trajectories responses to the question of why someone chooses art as lifelong vocation, how that inner necessity that sustains artistic practice over time comes into being – and when this experience becomes transmissible. By tradition we do not mean a fixed content, but a space in which thinking is set into motion. The masters appear here not as closed oeuvres, but as stations within an ongoing process.
In Hall 2 the works of the students are presented ‘alongside the masters’ reflections. This side by side placement does not create hierarchy, but dialogue. It becomes visible how an artistic voice becomes autonomous without denying its point of departure. Teaching, in this sense, isnot control but accompaniment: a form of attentive presence that simultaneously provides security and leaves room for risk.
Attention is one of the deepest ethical gestures. It is not possession, but turning toward. The essence of the master-student relationship can be grasped in this quality: in the fact that teaching is not prescription, but a risk undertaken together – the risk that the student
may ultimately arrive somewhere other than where the master once arrived.
The exhibition title – What We Preserve, What We Pass On – refers to this duality: the tension at the foundation of every creative process, the simultaneity of holding on and letting go, of remembering and beginning again. In this sense, art is not a system of answers, but a question that continually reopens: how can one remain faithful to what one has received, while also taking responsibility for what becomes visible through oneself?
Curator: Nikolett Colette Nagy
Masters: József Baksai, József Gaál, József Szurcsik
Students: Bálint Palágyi, Dániel Kristófy, Vivien Reining
Opening: 2026.02.03. 6PM
Venue: Apollo Gallery, Blaha Lujza Square 1 (Stáhly Street)
