On October 22, 2024, the Deputy Minister of Culture and Innovation, Róbert Zsigó, visited Zagreb and met with the Minister of Culture and Media, Nina Obuljen Korzinek. On the occasion of Mihály Munkácsy's birth, the Hungarian EU Presidency and our National Day on October 23, the Klovicevi Dvori Gallery jointly opened a large exhibition entitled Ideal and Reality: The First Golden Age of Hungarian Painting and the Beginnings of Modern Croatian Art. Antonio Picukaric, the director of the Klovicevi Dvori Gallery, and László Baán, the general director, also spoke at the opening.
The exhibition offers the Croatian public a unique opportunity to see the most significant works of Hungarian art from the end of the 19th century. A selection of works by the most famous Hungarian artists of this period - Bertalan Székely, Gyula Benczúr, Pál Szinyei Merse, Károly Lotz, Mihály Munkácsy - is presented alongside the giants of Croatian modernism (Vlaho Bukovac, Mata Celestin Medović, Bela Csikos, Ivan Tišov, Oton Iveković).
In his National Day speech, Róbert Zsigó spoke about the Hungarian will for freedom and the heroes of 1956, whose deeds he compared with the common hero of the two peoples - Miklós Zrínyi and the attack on Szigetvár. The deputy minister expressed his hope that thanks to the cooperation between the two art institutions, the cultural relations between the two countries will be further enriched by the exhibition that has just opened.
In her speech, Nina Obuljen Korzinek pointed out that with the exhibition "Ideal and Reality" we are strengthening our commitment and contribution to building even closer cultural cooperation between the two friendly countries and at the same time "reassessing Croatian-Hungarian historical relations by pointing out that our cultural and artistic cooperation, which realizes lasting values, continues to this day despite the linguistic differences and the past with its political turmoil."
