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István Nádler – New Paintings

In the middle of the 1960s, István Nádler was among the first Hungarian representatives of the neo-avant-garde movement. The early seventies saw him work in a geometric hard edge style, and in the next decade he developed a completely new creative strategy: this more relaxed, heterogeneous formal idiom relied on musical influences. The present exhibition opens a view onto the very important artistic development that has taken place since 2001, the radical formal innovations of the past seven years. After 2001, his black surfaces, which were combined with blue and white, became completely devoid of colour, and he restricted himself to the lyrical, sometimes playful, gestures of his broad brush. He took up colour again in 2005: first to return were colour fields that provided the foundations of the pictures, then the gestures themselves became colourful, and different hues of a single colour started to appear. The exhibition presents completely new pictures as well: Nádler created these specifically for the occasion, after carefully studying the exhibition space.