To mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Victor Vasarely, the Hungarian-born pioneer of op art, the Embassy of Hungary in Singapore, in partnership with LASALLE’s McNally School of Fine Arts, presents a special interactive lecture that explores one of the most fascinating artistic stories of the Cold War.
At the centre of the story is Vasarely’s iconic zebra motif—an image that managed to cross ideological borders at a time when abstract art was largely banned in socialist Hungary. In recent years, Vasarely’s work has attracted renewed international attention from collectors, museums and galleries, reflecting a broader rediscovery of op art’s influence on contemporary visual culture.
The story of the zebra motif offers a compelling lens through which to understand how a radical visual idea travelled across political and cultural borders during the Cold War, while shaping the visual language of modern design, architecture and media.
For collectors, curators and galleries alike, the afternoon provides a rare opportunity to revisit the intellectual origins and enduring relevance of one of the most recognisable visual signatures of twentieth-century modernism.
An independent art historian, curator, editor and art advisor, Gábor Rieder, PhD has been active in academic research of post-war art and the for-profit contemporary art world in Budapest over the last two decades.
As researcher and critic, he is author of several books and catalogs and hundreds of studies and reviews that focus on contemporary and post-war art in Hungary, Western and Eastern-European modernism, socialist realism and socialist modernism.
His various professional capacities in the last decade include: editor-in-chief of contemporary magazines (such as Flash Art Hungary and Artkartell), art director of Gallery Weekend Budapest, curator-at-large at Art+Text Budapest, art director of Artkartell projectspace and advisor at the Hungarian National Bank.
He is currently book editor of Kieselbach Gallery, curator of the Esterhazy Art Award, and co-director of American–Hungarian BuBu Program.
Based in Budapest, he curated large museum exhibitions to small nonprofit solos, mostly in Budapest, but also as guest curator in London (UK), Ankara (Turkey), and Graz (Austria). His recent book, Vasarely and Fajó: The Adventurous History of an Artistic Collaboration across the Iron Curtain from the Cold War to Capitalism was published in 2024, with an English version in 2025. His research on Vasarely was presented as exhibitions in the gallery of HAB (2024) and the Vaszary Gallery (2025).
