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Olomouc Art Museum and Visegrad fund present
artist
It is currently the fashion not to reveal your source of inspiration. Particularly for young artists.
There is no need to be ashamed of it because one thing builds on another.
Each generation builds on the previous one and always bring something new.
I have been primarily influenced by three artists. The painter László Lackner, poet János Pilinszky
and the painter, poet, performer, and great teacher Miklós Erdélyi.
Such personalities created the core ideas I could draw inspiration from.
In 1971, I was admitted to the Art College. It was not a university then.
It was very difficult to gain admission. I was eighteen when I was admitted.
It was crucial that members of a great generation taught there at the time.
It was actually the final working period of such great masters as Aurél Bernáth
Pál Pátzay, and Sándor Mikus. Even János Kmetty showed up there occasionally.
They were important personalities of Hungarian art.
I wanted to study under Lajos Szentiványi or Aurél Bernát from the beginning.
However, the latter did not give classes and that is how I met Szentiványi.
I was not sorry. He was a great master and teacher.
He lived in France in the 1930's and 1940's. He met Picasso, Bonnard and Matisse.
He brought an unbelievable French elegance, ease,
and the generosity of art to every lecture and tutorial.
From 1973, soon after my teacher died, new teachers joined the college.
Bernáth retired, Géza Fónyi died, Kmetty gave classes irregularly, Pátzay and Mikus also retired.
The great generation all left within a short space of time.
They were replaced by a new energetic group of young artists such as Ignác Kokas.
He was young and focused. I was the first to sign up for his classes after the death of my master.
His most important message was: "Hold on to your opinion even if you could get locked up!"
I had a few magazines from a factory, a dockyard and there were pictures of the best workers.
They were small, black-and-white pictures and I thought it was life itself.
From the moment I opened the magazine I did not know how to get rid of it. There was everything that surrounded me.
The life of a factory and the entire reality of the Hungarian working class.
My master could not understand why I was doing it. He said: "You paint like Velázquez, but you copy photographs.
I cannot understand, Why are you doing it?"
I sensed it was time to make a greater work.
At that time, I was fascinated by subway passages.
I made a 2,5 m x 2,5 m painting called the "Underpass".
Then I started to have problems at school.
A committee arrived and spent most of the time in the room that contained my works.
They took a long look and said I could not study anymore.
I was eligible for the military service then and I was called up to the army.
After completing my military service. I applied for a Derkovits Scholarship again. They first rejected me.
The scholarship was a great chance for young artists. It provided certain funds
and the guaranteed purchase of your works by the government. 41 00:06:36,48 --> 00:06:44,62 It was a great help and it meant I could get by. I could buy material.
But it was a hard beginning.
Already during my studies, or even earlier. I dealt with deserted Jewish cemeteries
in the country and in Budapest. I made an entire project about it.
They all died in Auschwitz, in Bergen-Belsen.
Nobody returned. Nobody could take care of the graves. There were silent tomb stones covered with greenery.
I started to sketch. Later, I painted the "Cemeteries Without Owners" cycle.
In 1980, my first significant exhibition was held in the Studio Gallery. It was a great success.
The response from the media was, of course, negative. But the visitors were on my side.
They saw me as a positive hero who went against the tide.
At that time, the Biennale was held in Venice.
The works were chosen by Géza Csorba, the deputy director of the National Gallery.
The material for the exhibition was diverse. There were works from older masters
to young artists there. A single work from each of them was presented there.
It gave a comprehensive picture of the Hungarian art scene of that time.
Yet we managed to get there. I showed a large 160 x 220 cm painting
from the underpass period, which I had painted after graduating.
The exhibition was a great success, They even talked about it on radio Free Europe.
The situation seemed to have relaxed, We could travel freely, even to Documenta in Kassel.
I think it was either 1981 or 1982, We also went to Kunstmesse in Basel.
I did not know what direction to take until I received a scholarship to Rome in 1986.
Change was in the air, You had more opportunities, you were freer.
That was what inspired me to paint a collection of paintings with antique motifs in Rome.
But let's go back to the early 1980's when we were invited to Prague and Brno
in what was then Czechoslovakia, It was a great experience to meet Ševčíks in Prague.
Incredibly they actively and intensely organized a presentation of contemporary art
on an international platform.
They invited all our group to dinner, during which they projected images of works of Czechoslovak artists.
They also organized a programme, during which we took a minibus and drove to the studios
of various underground artists.
of various underground artists, I will never forget Jitka Valová and her sister.
The welcomed us with a bottle of brandy even before we got inside.
There was a great atmosphere. I will also never forget Jiří David.
We made many friends. Then in 1997, I had a retrospective in Palais Lichtenstein in Vienna.
which is Mumok today.
The curator of the exhibition, Lóránd Hegyi, asked Ševčíks to contribute to the catalogue.
Ševčíks wrote a really great article about my paintings for the exhibition magazine.
Sometime in the early 1980's I painted the "Degi" cycle in the studio in Tác.
But I was not satisfied with it at all.
It was a large-scale, almost hyper-realistic painting containing human figures.
It was 2,5 x 2,5 m.
The next day, I returned to it and simply deleted the figures from the canvas.
As a result the figures were there, but at the same time were not there.
There was a landscape suffused with light and a forest.
It gave rise to a new situation, exactly as I wanted it.
I started to deliberately deal with the new situation. And new works followed.
In 1988, I painted the "Balcony".
It was the beginning of the yellow-black period.
I could present the period with the help of Kata Néray.
She was a curator in the Hungarian pavilion
at the Venice Biennale in 1990.
I was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 2000. It was a great milestone for me.
I knew I was in the right place.
A new series started after 2000. The already painted-over figures moved to the background.
I presented it at an exhibition in Kogart in Budapest and in the catalogue.
The "Tondó" period followed which has continued to the present.
I think that the simple, everyday scenes
contain everything that is happening in the world.
Not directly. Their reflections go much deeper.
They are neither superficial nor snapshots.
I try to seek the truth which permeates our entire existence.