DISCOVERIES – WORKS SELECTED FROM JÁNOS ANTAL KAZINCZY'S (1914–2008) OEUVRE
DISCOVERIES – WORKS SELECTED FROM JÁNOS ANTAL KAZINCZY'S (1914–2008) OEUVRE
4 October 2024 – 20 November 2024
It is a rare honour and excitement in the life of a gallery to presente a selection of works an oeuvre that is already complete and closed but is still little known in Hungary, despite its extraordinary quality and richness.
INDA Gallery is in this fortunate position now, when it presents paintings, enamel works and painted wooden sculptures by János Antal Kazinczy (b. 1914, Temesvár, Romania, d. 2008, Violés, France) from the period between the late 1970s and the early 2000s.
After studying drawing in his hometown at the age of eleven and learning the craft of engraving, Kazinczy became a student of Gyula Rudnay at the Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest at the age of 18. In 1935 he had to return to Romania for military service, and from 1938 he lived and worked in Nagyszeben, Romania. His early paintings depicting Transylvanian landscapes and people were destroyed in a bombing in Bucharest during World War II. From the end of 1944 he worked for nearly a year as managing editor of Magyar Szó, published in Temesvár, and in 1947 he fled to Hungary to escape arrest due to his political role in the Hungarian People's Alliance.
In 1949 he started teaching at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts and in the same year he became managing editor of the art periodical Szabad Művészet. Labeled a decadent and formalist, he was dismissed from college in 1950 , but he could retain his editorial position until 1953. In the 1956 Revolution his studio got seriously damaged, and his works were destroyed. In 1957 he left Hungary with his eleven-year-old son, to live and work first briefly in Austria, then in Germany, from 1967 in Rocbaron in southern France, 1995 in Vacqueyras, and then in Violés until his death in 2008.
All of the works on display in our exhibition were created in France between the late 1970s and early 2000s. Non-figurative paintings, sculptures, fire enamels, the basis of the compositions is predominantly light and vivit, but even if the shade is darker, organic shapes and lines fill the surfaces with life with a playful, free breath of geometry. Shapes painted with lively egg tempera on wood or Japanese paper sometimes have ink lines running and swirling through them. In the abstract shapes of the paintings, painted wooden sculptures and enamels, landscapes, fragmented layers of earth, small animals, unicellulars, aquatic plants, or, elsewhere the mysterious blueness of the starry sky, in yet other compositions, the body and strings of a musical instrument seem to appear, or a city scene seems to pulsate in the contour of a vehicle.
Curator: Zsolt Kozma
On view: October 4 - November 20, 2024
Opening: Tuesdays to Fridays 2 p.m.–6 p.m., or by appointment
Online catalogue:
