Transferred Red Painting to Paris, from the series "Transfer Paintings"

In 1974 Gábor Attalai was allowed to visit Paris and London—a rare privilege in Communist Hungary. In advance of his travels, he prepared several works in which he affixed swatches of red canvas in pairs to a larger white canvas (red and white were the colors of the Russian Constructivist movement, founded 1920, which had early adherents in Hungary). Attalai then ripped one square from each work and adhered it to a tourist location in the cities he visited, photographing the swatch in situ and gluing his photograph onto the larger canvas when he returned home. The exchange of his textile, grounded in modern art from Eastern Europe, for a photograph taken in France established a dialogue between institutions and histories of art in East and West.