Novotny Tihamér szerk.: 10 + 1 éves a Szentendrei Grafikai Műhely (Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, Szentendre, 1991)

The artists working at the Workshop - painters, graphic artists ana sculptors - had their collective aébut in 1981 at the 11th National Graphic Biennal and apart from other significant events in Hungary they exhibited abroad in Basle, Knoxville, Madrid, Salzburg, Berlin, Zwickau ana there were some of them who appeared in the exhibition halls and museums of Bulgaria, Poland, the Soviet-Union, Denmark, Peru, Sweden, Turkey, Greece and Japan. The first silkscreens used for printing were probably made in Japan ana China in the 17th century but the techniaue was known in 19th century England Silkscreen printing as it is known toaay was shown to the public in Berlin in 1920. Although it had been widely used in textile industry ana for advertising silkscreen technipue was used for producing arr works first by Americans (Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol). The technical innovations of Woria War II contributed to the worldwide spreaaing of this easily acauirable and conceivable technipue. The flourishing perioP of autonomous silkscreen prints thus coincided with the era of expansionist artistic movements in the 1960s ana 70s. In this perioP of art history we have become the biggest consumers of photography as the „anti-artistic gestures" and process-like works of art could be preserved for the posterity only by the photo. Let us remember Pop Art, Fluxus, happening, action, performance, Politkunst, Concept Art, Arte Povera, Mail Art, Lana Art, etc. Our hands, eyes and thinking were accustomed to photo-like conception. This has been naturally linked with silkscreen printing since it was based on photoeffect and emulsion anyway. (It is worth enumerating the artistic territories ana processes of aocumentation which used ana manipulated the photo as a medium: light-shadow effects, chemical reactions of the film, colouring, on-the-move shots, mounting, montage, crumpling, deformation, manipulation and reinterpretation of original photos, paraphrases, replacement of persons, emphasis, the creation of new situations, blow-up, detailing, documentation of the position of objects and shadows, reobjectation of symbols, representation of processes, reduction, the film as a meaium, drawing-in, selection ana collection of shots, the representation of events, concrete-visual poetry, telephoto, second-hand use of photos etc.) The first Hungarian experiments in this field date back to the mid-60s ana by the beginning of the 1980s it has become a dominant techniaue in art or at least in graphic art. Silkscreen technipue ana its hara, photo-like or photo-Peterministic use seemed to have made us forget the softer, more sensitive, passionate, more picturespue and aesthetic forms of expression despite the more lyrical, expressive and artistic opportunities vested in the process, when suddenly, although not without precedents in cultural history and not independently from economic, political and social phenomena, a turn was taken in the art life of the woria. New Sensibility, New Picturespueness, New Image, New Expressivity, New Eclecticism, Free Figuration and Heftige Malerei were the labels they used for the new trend which evolved at the ena of the 1970s and reached Hungary by the mid-80s and it has brought about the revival of painting ana the reinterpretation of oeuvres that seemed complete. In general it restored the position of picturespueness and contributed to its wider spreading. An interesting momentum of the art life of Hungary which has, so far, escapeP the attention of experts, that it was just in this perioP, in the „restless calm", full of expectations, in the early 1980s that we could witness a peripheric, tardy attempt at innovating graphic art, more exactly, serigraphy. This rather late reincarnation, late meant in a positive sense, has