For almost seventy years, art education has been an integral part of higher education in Eger, the history of which goes back to two and a half centuries. Up to the early 1990s, the image of the department founded in 1948 was defined by the training of art teachers. From 1993 the education has been expanded with a Drawing and Visual Communication program. The Visual Art Institute came into being in 2016 and is comprised of four departments: the Fine Art Department, the Media and Design Department, the Motion Picture Arts and Communication Department and the Department of Visual Education and Art Theory.
The art teacher training having a long tradition has been transformed significantly over the past decade and has moved towards the direction of artist education. This allows us to provide numerous choices to our students in the field of visual education, from classical fine arts to graphic design, filmmaking and visual education.
Our aim is to train excellent professionals who come through as autonomous artists and tutors as well, who are more familiar with the issues of visuality than the average, and well-prepared to meet the challenges of both education and the creative industry.
These abilities are based on solid professional knowledge, from classical drawing to the confident use of up-to-date technical tools, as well as theoretical skills in art and film history and aesthetics.\
We are aware of the fact that our work as tutors and organizers goes far beyond the 3- or 5-year period that students spend here, or that it goes even beyond our students’ professional success. Our graduate students, working as artists or educators, will greatly affect the visual culture of a community or an area across multiple generations. They will be the designers of the objects and the visual world around us; artists, filmmakers who create our visual environment. They will teach the next generation aesthetic sensibility, high standards of visual experience and openness to the reception of the arts of their time.
Beside the tutorial job, the teachers at the Institute lay a great emphasis on that our students have opportunities to place their works and achievements in context. To this end, we have developed professional relationships with national, cross-border, European and Far Eastern educational and art institutions.
Thanks to these co-operations our students have had the opportunity to learn, create or exhibit in a number of art colonies, exhibitions and film festivals in Hungary, in art institutions in Oradea, Cluj, Kosice, as well as in higher educational institutions in India, Taiwan, Indonesia, Korea and Japan. Naturally, this relationship network operates on the basis of reciprocity, which involves that our Institute receives students and tutors from partner institutions as well. Many come to us to study with us for a semester and to participate in art colonies, exhibitions, film workshops that we organize. These occasions have a great motivational force. Students who participate in such primary events, beyond the fact that they can try themselves in an international environment, or even in the country’s most prestigious institutes, become part of a professional contact network that they can benefit from for a lifetime.
Lajos Csontó habil.
associate professor
head of Institute