The classification system popularised by commercial marketing has taken over the American social sciences’ approach to generational labelling. By its very nature, it does not fit neatly into Hungarian reality.

The series DuckTales, interrupted on Hungarian public television by the announcement of the death of József Antall (the first freely elected prime minister of Hungary) evokes a very different experience here than it does in the US.

Yet over the past decade, the Hungarian vernacular has – relatively automatically – adopted the alphabetical Anglo-Saxon notation of the generations, including the term Generation Y for millennials.

But just as the y plays a different role in Indo-European Western grammar than in Hungarian spelling, where it softens the consonant, so the experience of the Hungarian generation is also changed by the social-historical milieu, for example by the childhood experience of the regime change, the course of global politics or the boom and bust of the art market.

Generation Y is blazing its own trail in contemporary Hungarian art. Hungarian millennial artists are digital natives by birth, and as children they were raised in consumer capitalism, surrounded by advertising and products. But with the 2008 global economic crisis, they quickly learned the negative side of market collapse.

As a university student (the College of Fine Arts became the University of Fine Arts in 2000), they grew into contemporary conceptual art, while discovering international abstract academism for themselves as EU citizens on residency programmes.

Over the past decade or more, their mature art has put digital image editing software to work, utilized industrial production logic, turned geometry on its ear and rewritten pop art into gesture. In the meantime, they’ve been drawn back to nature, and have realised the visceral power of instinctive form-making.

Since the mid-2010s, members of the Hungarian Y-generation have been involved in the global art scene through exhibition websites and Instagram. Through their online presence and gallery representation, they have achieved unprecedented success in the international art scene, but they have also got along with Hungarian art collectors.

Millennials have also played an important role in the large-scale contemporary art collection launched by the Central Bank of Hungary, now in its fifth year of expansion. This exhibition presents a selection of them.

Although an institutional collection cannot give a complete picture of an entire generation, it can reveal typical positions. The curatorial selection on display here uses the works of Generation Y young people in the collection to draw a possible profile of the generation: the Y-profile.

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Ludwig Museum Budapest