Works by a Budapest Painter Are in the Collection of the Centre Pompidou

Three paintings by Tamás Konok have been included in the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among artists such as Joan Miró and Victor Vasarely, reports Magyar Nemzet.

According to the statement, the gallery’s paintings will now be exhibited alongside works by artists such as Mondrian, Miró, Dubuffet, Duchamp, and Brâncuși, as well as Hantai and Vasarely. As they pointed out, the Centre Pompidou is not only home to the largest collection of contemporary art in Europe, but also to one of the most valuable in Europe.

Tamás Konok (1930-2020) was already the recipient of numerous awards in his lifetime, including the Kossuth Prize, the Prima Primissima Prize, the Hungarian Cross of Merit, and the National Order of Merit of France.

However, this honor is particularly important in the afterlife of the artist’s oeuvre, as Konok spent more than thirty years in Paris, where the artistic milieu largely influenced his career and style.

Konok arrived in Paris in 1959 on a scholarship and lived there until the early 1990s, before moving back to Budapest. In a sense, the works in the collection can now return home.

The Centre Pompidou has chosen three outstanding works from the 1970s: Graphidion vert (1976), Extension (1975), and Espace descriptif (1975). The mid-decade marked a turning point in Konok’s art, as his travels in Zurich led him to discover the geometric abstract formal language that would later become the basis of his work. “His uniqueness lies in the sometimes straight and sometimes curved lines that cut up the monochrome surfaces, which are made exciting by their contrasting colors,” the statement points out.

Konok was born on January 9, 1930 and died on November 20, 2020 in Budapest. He studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He moved to Paris in 1959, was active in Zurich, and lived and worked in Budapest from the 1990s onwards.

His first solo exhibition was held in 1960 at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.

He had a solo museum exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands in 1964, followed by a solo show in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1983, he was included in the “Geometrische Abstraktion” exhibition in Zurich, in the company of J. Albers, F. Morellet and F. Picabia. In Switzerland, he collaborated with Galerie Schlégl and exhibited several times at the Art-Expo in Basel.

In Hungary, from the 1980s onwards, he had exhibitions in several important venues, including the Xantus János Museum in Győr (western Hungary), the Museum of Fine Arts (together with his artist wife Katalin Hetey), the Ernst Museum, and the Ludwig Museum.

Via Magyar Nemzet; Featured image via Facebook/Konok – Hetey Művészeti Alapítvány