The Ludwig Museum planned to celebrate painter Tamás Konok’s 90th birthday with a large-scale oeuvre exhibition. In view of the emergency situation, the exhibition was postponed from September to December, and more than a hundred works by Tamás Konok had been installed by the opening on December 10, 2020. However, due to the latest epidemiological measures, the exhibition cannot open yet.
It is more than painful for us that Tamás Konok, at the zenith of his creativity and surrounded by general respect and love, did not live to see the opening of the exhibition, for which he made new works, and his friends organized festive programs, concerts and conversations. The event thus turned into a memorial exhibition honouring the unique, special, constantly renewing art of Tamás Konok, under the title “Vers l’infini” (“to infinity”), borrowing the title of one of the artist’s works.
In recent decades, smaller and larger selections of Tamás Konok’s oeuvre have been organized, and like the previous ones, this exhibition cannot provide a complete overview of the oeuvre, which includes more than four thousand pieces and spans seven decades; it only flashes his art periods, the typical genres and themes. The material of the exhibition was selected from the artist’s studio, with his contribution, with a strong emphasis on the latest works made in the 2000s and 2010s, which proved the artist’s seemingly inexhaustible zest for life and creativity with their formal variety and striking colours. The larger part of the exhibition is made up of these large-scale pictures, which summarize his work while at the same time seek new ways.
A smaller selection focuses on the naturalistic paintings made in the 1950s and then the path-finding collages and graphics of the 1960s, which were made after he settled in Paris in 1959. Konok’s art gradually clarified from the seventies onwards, and he developed his characteristic geometric painting based on the order of lines and the balance of colours, a form of representation he called Graphidion. Starting from the eighties, he experimented again with new image forms, spatial structures and architectures. The subject of Tamás Konok’s art is not reality, but the internal order and movements of nature. In his paintings, he intends to make the invisible idea, detached from the material, visible. His art culminates in the images, reduced to the ultimate, showing order beyond material reality, in which his striving for spiritual purity, his openness to the transcendent, is manifested.
As part of the exhibition, visitors can view a rich selection of Tamás Konok’s small sketches and graphics, the so-called Microludiums, which were on display at the Bible Museum in Budapest in 2015. In two halls, we will again present the interactive museum education chamber exhibition organized jointly with biologist Tamás Vásárhelyi, which opened in the summer of 2019 at Deák 17 Gallery under the title Space – Motion – Game. We will also screen the 2019 documentary film about Tamás Konok entitled Graphidions.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue to be published during January-February 2021.
Curator: Krisztina Szipőcs
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Virtual tour in Tamás Konok's oeuvre exhibition
The material of the exhibition was selected from the artist’s studio, with his contribution, with a strong emphasis on the latest works made in the 2000s and 2010s, which proved the artist’s seemingly inexhaustible zest for life and creativity with their formal variety and striking colours. The larger part of the exhibition is made up of these large-scale pictures, which summarize his work while at the same time seek new ways.
