The gallery can be found in Rákosliget, in the eastern part of Budapest’s outskirts, the idyllic atmosphere of which offers a country-like lifestyle for its inhabitants. It is situated on the corner of Ferihegyi and XVI. Streets. The building and its garden is surrounded by a solid fence and the leafy boughs of some huge trees emerge over it. This environment also gives the hint that Árpád Csekovszky, the outstanding representative of the Hungarian Ceramic Arts, who had been teaching at the University of Applied Arts for 40 years and who was awarded by significant prizes in Hungary and also abroad, was seeking for peace and quiet for his creative activity. And he found it in this intimate enclosure.

His home and his studio, which he built in the garden in1962, at Rákosliget, was the place where he could retire and regenerate amidst the sometimes very loud fights of the cultural and educational policy. Here he created his great mural works, his figurines and his paintings. His plastic works built from clay straps that formulated human or animal bodies or which are connected into tectonic forms first got their places on the shelves of the studio, then the Master placed them onto the lawn of the garden or under a tree or into the inner gallery of the brick fence. Sooner or later his works became close and integral furnishing elements of the whole living space of the family. They witnessed every family occasion.

Respecting the artist’s close connection to his home and his demand to keep his artistic legacy together, his family with the assistance and financial help of the Local Council of the XVIIth District, altered the formal studio into a three-storey gallery. There and in the garden Árpád Csekovszky’s 320 works are displayed. The visitors can also have an impression of the original studio atmosphere in one of the corners, and some video films show the artist himself. Árpád Csekovszky’s artistic inheritance consists of more than 1,800 pieces (plastic figures and figurines, mural designs, graphic works and paintings). The displayed works have been selected by some experts and also the family so that they can give a full view of his entire oeuvre.

This collection, which is a small but important gem of the Hungarian cultural inheritance, is a unique collection which is kept together and set in a worthy surrounding.

Albrecht, Júlia