Barnabás Bencsik

curator, art historian, gallerist

Barnabás Bencsik, born in 1964, lives and works in Budapest. From 1990 to 1999 he ran the Studio Gallery Budapest, the exhibition venue of the Studio of Young Artists Association. He worked as the head of the Trafo Gallery, Budapest (1999–2001) and as chief curator in Műcsarnok|Kunsthalle, where he contributed to the project at the Hungarian Pavilion of 49th Venice Biennale. In 2001 he started to work as the artistic director of the first private collection which ran an exhibition space in a former industrial building called MEO–Contemporary Art Collection, Budapest and from 2002 to 2008 he acted as an independent curator and he has been involved in various visual art projects and exhibitions. He initiated and from 2006 he is the head of ACAX | Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange, which is an office to support and develop various types of cooperation between the local and the international art scene. He was the director of Ludwig Museum–Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest between 2008-2013, but because of the radical shift in the Hungarian cultural policy, he was not re-appointed. After years of freelancing and working on non-profit projects in 2017 he started to run with a joined business partner a commercial gallery in Budapest called Glassyard Gallery intending to provide a sustainable platform for international visibility of the regional art scene.