Miklós Sulyok's extensive and always up-to-date knowledge and expertise is evident from the first meeting. His knowledge of art history is based on his studies at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), where he graduated in 1986. At the same time, he also completed a degree in Italian, graduating in 1983.
He is known primarily as an art historian, but he has also done remarkable work as a translator and editor. In 2000, he was commissioned to proofread the Italian-Hungarian and Hungarian-Italian dictionaries of the Akadémiai Publishing House, and has translated from Italian into Hungarian for several publishers, including Manet, Cézanne and Giorgione from the Corvina Publishing House's Classics of Art series, and The History of the Franciscan Order, published by Agapé. In addition to the above, editing and proofreading of content and language - in Hungarian, Italian and English - have been part of his professional activity for several decades.
The subject of his thesis, which was written in Italian, combines the two disciplines and is related to the field of the publication of sources on the history of early Renaissance architecture in Italy: he translated the most important Brunelleschi source, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti's Vita di Ser Filippo Brunelleschi, a biography of the late 15th century, into Hungarian and wrote an introduction in Italian.
This shows that he was already interested in architectural history during university. This field of study later increasingly determined his career, but instead of universal historical architecture he became interested in contemporary Hungarian architecture, the research and communication of which he still considers his main task.
He had the opportunity to mediate immediately after university, as in 1986 he took up a position as curator of architecture and fine art exhibitions at the Budapest Gallery, the contemporary art institution of the capital of Budapest, where - apart from a few years' interruption - he still works as an art historian. As part of this work, he curated, among others, the exhibition of Imre Makovecz in 1995.
In the Budapest Gallery, he has organized several exhibitions presenting the work of architects, architectural studios and groups, such as the Pécs Group (1986) and the Miskolc Architectural Workshop. The Department of Public Building Design at the Budapest University of Technology (BME) can also be described as a group of architects, or at least an intellectual workshop. Miklós Sulyok was the co-curator and György Major the internal curator of the exhibition, which was organised to mark the 60th anniversary of the department's foundation in 1946 and featured a selection of works by its teachers and great predecessors. In addition to the above-mentioned, the Budapest Gallery also presented to the Hungarian public, for example, Sándor Dévényi (1989), Ferenc Bán, Tibor Szalai (2001), István Ferencz (2004), Zsolt Zsuffa and László Kalmár (2005), a section of their oeuvre or their entire oeuvre, as well as architectural and applied art works from Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, all curated by Miklós Sulyok.
The art historian is also responsible for numerous exhibitions of fine and applied art, including those of Károly Schmal (1999 and 2016), Dániel Erdély (2005), Sándor Molnár (2006) and Attila Csáji (2007). Sándor Molnár's Sunjata exhibition was a continuation of the 2016 exhibition at the Vigadó in Pesti, co-curated by Miklós Sulyok and Gábor Lajta, which presented the so-called white paintings from the fifth stage of the artist's five great periods, the Void.
One of the defining moments of Miklós Sulyok's career was the year 2002, when, following a successful competition, he was awarded the curatorial mandate of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Three renowned Hungarian architects, István Ferencz, Tamás Nagy and Gábor Turányi, were exhibited in the pavilion. The curator's intention was to give the international public a better insight into the work of designers who have strong ties to the place, i.e. Hungary, but who are also open to influences from the world of architecture. In this way, the art historian wished to draw attention to the fact that without respect for the past and a desire for continuity, it is not worth approaching the 2002 Biennale with the slogan "next", "future trends" or "moving forward".
Following the Biennale, he was invited by Ferenc Cságoly, then head of the Department of Public Building Design, to participate in the department's postgraduate architectural engineering course as a lecturer. From 2005 to 2013, Miklós Sulyok was a lecturer in the course Contemporary Domestic Architecture. In this course, he sought to transmit to young architects, in dialogue with them, the thinking that characterises so-called "critical regionalism".
Both the Venice exhibition and the educational activities were based on the art historian's main research area, the aforementioned critical regionalism in Hungarian contemporary architecture. Since the beginning of his career, Miklós Sulyok has been exploring the field of architecture that does not emphasise rupture, but whose main aim is to find a way to rewrite the existing history - the history of a place, village, community or family. He discovered this approach in Hungary through the work of the Miskolc Architectural Workshop, among others. The architectural group, whose master was Antal Plesz, an architect not formally associated with the group, worked at Északterv in Miskolc from 1977 to 1990. The members of the group were, without claiming to be exhaustive, Csaba Bodonyi, Pál Farkas, István Ferencz, János Golda, Katalin Gergely, Zoltán Horváth (Figura), Zoltán Klie, Mária Lohrmann, Tamás Noll, Ágnes Novák, Attila Pirity, László Rostás, Mihály Rudolf, László Szőke, Ágnes Thoma, József Viszlai and István Sári.
As the art historian pointed out, their activities were in opposition to the abstract, utopian, non-local approach of modernism, while their architecture was not theoretically grounded, and their diversity and non-ideological nature were always emphasised. Miklós Sulyok describes the regionalism that is so characteristic of the architecture of the members of the workshop as follows: for the architect, the primary concern is to understand the environment from a historical, social and architectural point of view, that is, to relate to the place, even by using local formal elements without imitation or sentimentality. The aim is to be present in the design process from the outset, to play a catalytic role in the design, its preparation and its implementation.
The art historian gave a lecture on Architecture, History, Place at the academic conference on 15 May 2015, illustrating the design approach of the workshop with a number of examples. He illustrated this way of thinking particularly well with two design projects from István Ferencz's oeuvre, one of which was the so-called Miskolc Music Mill (1982), where, in contrast to the design programme, the architect decided to keep the existing mill building and fought to realise it, and the other was the Újpest Cultural Centre, where the architect created a "small town" isolated from the prefabricated houses within the ensemble surrounding the cultural centre.
In his research, Miklós Sulyok also draws attention to the fact that the workshop's approach can be paralleled with the theory of critical regionalism first developed by Kenneth Frampton in 1983, and that in different parts of the world, including Hungary, responses to the alienating effects of modernism developed independently and at approximately the same time - although their representatives did not renounce "the liberating and forward-looking elements of the modern architectural heritage." Regionalism in Hungarian architecture is neither a tendency nor a formal language, but rather a way of looking at things, which can be just as valid today and which, as a result, Miklós Sulyok considered 'teachable' or at least transferable to architects in postgraduate training.
In his research, he also points out that some of the later works of the members of the Miskolc Architectural Workshop, such as the building of the Piarist High School in Szeged designed by János Golda, are also the result of this design approach, but regionalism is also characteristic of architects not associated with the workshop, such as Tamás Nagy, Gábor Turányi, Péter Sugár, Mihály Balázs and the creators of Hungarian organic architecture.
Miklós Sulyok has been a corresponding member of the Art Theory Section of the MMA since 2014. As an academic, he considers it important to study the Hungarian characteristics of the postmodern era, Hungarian regionalism and organic architecture and their antecedents within the Institute for Art Theory and Methodology. In addition, he also attaches great importance to the mediation of architectural and fine arts creativity, and to the understanding and dissemination of the creative process, which he has the opportunity to do as the professional responsible for the Tuesday Kaleidoscope workshop series organised by the Art Theory Section of the MMA. In the framework of the series, he has taken on the role not only of editor but also of interviewer during the evenings on architect Tamás Nagy, photographer László Haris and architect Anthony Gall.
As an art historian, academic, translator, broadcaster and in other professional capacities, he strives to explore the history, characteristics and presence of domestic critical regionalism in contemporary architecture. The results of his research will soon be made available to the general public. The forthcoming book on the Miskolc Architects' Workshop will focus on the group's activities in the 1980s. The research, which has been ongoing for several years, was supported by the Bálint Szeghalmy Foundation in Miskolc, the NKA and the MMA.
A separate monograph on one of the most influential members of the workshop, Csaba Bodonyi, will also give the art historian the opportunity to reflect on the questions that have arisen in the course of his research on regionalism, to seek answers to them and to find foreign aspects and parallels of the Hungarian regionalist approach. The forthcoming volumes will certainly become an important part of the oeuvre, but we should not forget the articles and studies that regularly appear in the specialised press (see the list of publications).
[2017]