Attila Kovács (artist)

Attila Kovács (born December 15, 1938 in Budapest ; † April 6, 2017 there ) was a Hungarian- German painter and draftsman . The artist lived in West Germany from 1964 and from 1984 in both Hungary and Germany.

Life

Attila Kovács attended the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts, Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Iparművészeti Főiskola) from 1958 to 1964 and studied tapestry and decorative painting in Budapest. In 1964 he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany via Vienna and studied from 1965 to 1969 at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart , where he received his diploma in 1970. Kovács was professor of painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzőművészeti Főiskola) between 1997 and 2001 and lived in both Cologne and Budapest. In 2001 he received the title "Doctor of Liberal Arts" at the Art Faculty of the Janus Pannonius University of Sciences (Janus Pannonius Tudományegyetem) in Pécs. In 2009 he stopped teaching and in 2010 he also closed his studio in Cologne. In the same year he finally moved to Budapest. He was a member of the German Association of Artists .

plant

Kovács began his career as a visual artist in February 1958 and it was here that his first abstract paintings and non-figurative pastel pictures were created. In that year he began to work out the additive foundations for his own visual language theory: one + one +… (Yes-No, 1958, paper, tempera). In the autumn of 1963 he had a strange intellectual meeting with the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai on the pages of the magazine "Leben und Wissenschaft" - there he read an extract from Bolyai's theoretical research on non-Euclidean geometry, which later became a cornerstone of his life's work. Kovács emigrated to West Germany, where he made his first sequential drawings from July 3 to August 26, 1964 in the temporary foreigners' camp in Zirndorf near Nuremberg. According to research by the State Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg, this series of 14 drawings is the first sequential work with ambitious visual art that currently belongs to the museum's collection.

In the second, early phase of his life's work in West Germany, between 1964 and 1970, he turned away from representational painting and worked out an individual artistic language which he named as a reference system or as transmutative plasticity . For these first experiments with structures - the first mathematically-programmed processes since 1967 - he wrote the “Manifesto of Transmutative Plasticity”, 1968 “The Aesthetic Space” and 1969 “On Tramutative Plasticity”. In 1967 he programmed his sequences with mathematical parameters; He assigned numerical values ​​to some drawing sections (with the same or similar visual values), whereby he gradually changed the basic forms, similar to mathematical sequences. There he got to know the German philosopher Max Bense , who could see the visual formulation of his own aesthetic and philosophical thoughts in the works of the young artist - therefore he supported him and he maintained a good relationship with Attila Kovács until the end of his life in 1990. Meanwhile, Kovács introduced the irreversible concepts of space, time, speed and irreversibility - which were the natural component of a visual language before Romanticism - so that he could understand the two building blocks of structures (expression and articulation) with the help of exact parameters ( Information), independently of each other. Using mathematical coordinates, he created his own, non-Euclidean geometry following an “xyz space-time axis”, following sequential geometric abstraction. He recorded the infinite sequences completed in this way in the "Function table of the synthesizability and relativization of visual structures". So the concept of synthetic programming was born. With the help of algorithms he traced the structural analysis and synthesis of the circle and the square. He executed some selected parts of his transformations on canvas or on paper attached to a wooden panel; H. The progressive-regressive quadrilaterals and the coordination p3 works have thus been completed.

In 1977 he was invited to documenta 6 in Kassel, where he was allowed to exhibit the sequences developed in his (on his p3 -based) p13 series in the Fridericanum hall. In the catalog published by the documenta, his study , titled visual, transformational , appears. With the help of an excerpt from this study, Kovács' principle of the relationship between structure and form can be understood, which states that structure is something completely different from form: s ≠ f. The structure can be relativized, the structure is the language per se. Let us call the structure quite simply a network, which the artist - based on intuitions - builds on a square, on a rectangle. Forms that appear in the network are nothing more than transformations of some sequences. In the meantime he made his meta-square-shaped ( shaped canvas ) panels in 1975 , where the starting and ending point itself is the structure, the “net”, the transformation of which from the artistic endpoints defines the limits of the modeled canvas. The more than hundred-page program booklet produced between 1967 and 1973 contains these series of his transformations, which are algorithms based on arithmetic, linear algebra, and parameters. These theoretically reconstructable or further developable open structures by Kovács, based on mathematical sequences, and the visual replicas of the form contained in them - i.e. the structure and form syntheses defined in the program booklet - can be produced with the help of a computer and are immediately ready for printing . In 1972, in parallel to his program booklet, he defined the starting point of a non-Euclidean color theory. Based on his program booklet, he wrote three sequences in 1979 in the teletext system of the German Post. In 1982 he also programmed three sequences in the teletext system of the Hungarian television (Magyar Televizió). In 1984 he completed his first metal lines, which he then laid out in changing structures, as a result of which the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th line depends on the position of the changing structure.

In 1984 he won the artist prize of the Bonner Kunstfonds with his "Endless Imaginary Columns" Meta-Points: Here is there <--> there is the work entitled here . The two programs that define his 80s are "the metal line in position dependence" and the meta-points: "Here is there <--> there is here". In a homogeneous Euclidean coordinate system we give the point positions with two coordinate numbers, while in a non-Euclidean discontinuous system three coordinates are used for this. From 1984 he visited Hungary regularly as a German citizen, and in addition to his studio in Cologne he also worked as an artist in Budapest. In 1995 a retrospective exhibition of his works was organized in the Kunsthalle (Műcsarnok) in Budapest. In 2005 the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem) published his selected works: "About the transmutative plasticity" (Az átalakuló plasztikusság, 1969), "Art & Mathematics" (Művészet és matematika, 1975), "Principles and conclusions" ( Alapelvek és következtetések, 1993). His works were usually realized in two dimensions. Alternatively, they start flat and develop following the rhythm of the mathematically determined sequential movements, then step into the room and form a kind of geometric frieze on the wall surface. The very noticeable coefficient of his wooden panels and paper-based works is the incomparable, excellent manuality. All panel paintings by the artist are individually executed paintings made of 40 layers, primed supports. The works of Kovács are extraordinary examples of the human ability to concentrate. He consciously and purposefully transformed the color that he used as a living material into a component of the picture, i.e. H. he created "a figurative truth, a figurative quality". The works of Attila Kovács are assigned to the collections of the national museums in the context of Minimal Art, Concept Art, and monochrome and non-relational painting. His life's work is characterized by countability. Its unique and complex world of its own is composed of interwoven but separately interpretable components:

“No matter what we think about or what we look at, there are two different ways in which you can relate to things or to anyone: CONTINUOUS or DISCONTINUOUS. That is why it is better if we regard everything that exists, what is different from the others, as a unit and also as something complex. The continuity, however, is closely related to something that the artists not only dislike, but downright despise: and this is the QUANTITY and its linguistic counterpart, the NUMBER. "

- Attila Kovács

“What we see is not composed of visible elements; what we think does not consist of thoughts, but is the result of a grammatical synthesis. All linguistic relations are sensual in the eye of the "means of transport"; in contrast to their rules, which are not sensual but structural. The parameters that determine the image format, ie the informational structure of the image, are not visible, but the form resulting from the informational structure becomes visible. The information organizes the material to form, to form. "

-

"The theme of Kovács' work can best be summarized as follows: for him, it is about the difference, the disintegration of the abstract imaginable, coherent structures with their manifestations."

- Wulf Herzogenrath

Solo exhibitions

• 1969 Hansjörg Mayer Gallery, Stuttgart, FRG
• 1970 Galerie Studium Generale, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, FRG
• 1970 Atelier Glasmeier, Gelsenkirchen-Buer, FRG
• 1971 Mutzenbach Gallery, Dortmund, FRG
• 1971 Kunstverein, Unna, FRG
• 1972 Szepan Gallery, Gelsenkirchen, FRG
• 1972 Teufel Gallery, Cologne, Germany
• 1973 Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, FRG
• 1973 Galerie Swart, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• 1974 Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, FRG
• 1974 Jesse Gallery, Bielefeld, FRG
• 1975 Teufel Gallery, Cologne, Germany
• 1976 Albers-Kovács, Museum Ludwig , Cologne, BDR
• 1976 Kovács-Albers, Teufel Gallery, Cologne, BDR
• 1977 Swart Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• 1977 Galerie Hermanns, Munich, BDR
• 1978 Hilger + Schmeer Gallery, Duisburg, FRG
• 1979 Brigitte March Gallery, Stuttgart, FRG
• 1979 Karin Fesel Gallery, Düsseldorf, FRG
• 1979 Junior Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 1980 Seestrasse Gallery, Rapperswil, Zurich, Switzerland
• 1981 Gallery Hermanns, Munich, FRG
• 1981 Dieter Lohl graphic collection, Unna, FRG
• 1982 Artothek, Cologne, FRG
• 1982 Brigitte March Gallery, Stuttgart, FRG
• 1982 Gallery Czyszczenie Dywanow, Lodz, Poland
• 1983 Hannover Art Museum , Sprengel Collection, Hannover, FRG
• 1983 Edition & Galerie Hoffmann, Friedberg, FRG
• 1983 Red and Blues Gallery, Maastricht, The Netherlands
• 1986 Wack Gallery, Kaiserslautern, FRG
• 1987 Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, FRG
• 1987 Fészek Galéria with András Mengyán, Budapest, Hungary
• 1988 Galerie Hermanns, Munich, FRG
• 1988 Brigitte March Gallery, Stuttgart, FRG
• 1988 Town Hall, Waldshut-Tiengen, FRG
• 1989 Wack Gallery, Kaiserslautern, FRG
• 1990 Karin Fesel Gallery, Düsseldorf, DE
• 1991 Kassák Museum, Budapest
• 1992 Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest
• 1993 Karin Fesel Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 1993 Szombathely Art Gallery, Szombathely (Hungary)
• 1993 Fészek Galéria , Budapest
• 1993 Ermitage Gallery, Berlin, Germany
• 1994 Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study
• 1994 Budapest Kiscelli Museum, Budapest
• 1995 Ucher Gallery, Cologne, Germany
• 1995 Art Hall , Budapest
• 1995 Galeria u Jezuitów, Poznań, Poland
• 1998 Pál Szinyei Merse Company, Pest Center Gallery, Budapest
• 2001 University, Pécs, Hungary
• 2002 Archbishop's Diocesan Museum, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany
• 2004 art from NRW, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 2005 Brigitte March Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany
• 2007 University of Babes-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• 2007 Symmetry: Art and Science, ISIS-Symmetry, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 2007 squares and meta-squares, Galerie B. March, Stuttgart, Germany
• 2008 Symmetry: Art and Science, ISIS-Symmetry, House for Architecture, Lviv, Ukraine
• 2009 Bolyai-Kovács, MTA Library, Budapest
• 2010 Gallery B55, Budapest
• 2011 Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest
• 2013 New Museum Nuremberg , Germany
• 2013 Crystals and Data Formats, MTA Library, Budapest
• 2014 Time Geometries, VILTIN Galéria, Budapest
• 2015 After Péri and Stella, VILTIN Galéria, Budapest
• 2016 MAYOR Gallery , London, England
• 2017 Art Brussels, rediscovery with the VILTIN gallery

Group exhibitions

• 1969 Operations, Museum Fridericianum , Kassel, Germany
• 1972 Meeting of the Reiser Collection, Museum Ulm, Germany
• 1972 art 3 art fair Basel, with the Teufel gallery, Switzerland
• 1973 Program - Chance System, Etzold Collection, Städt.Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany
• 1973 Constructivism 1913 - 1973, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, FRG
• 1973 Visual Regulations, Neue Nationalgalerie , Berlin, FRG
• 1973 Drawings, Swart Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• 1973 art 4 art fair Basel with the Galerie Teufel, Basel, Switzerland
• 1974 Art of Our Time - New Acquisitions, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, FRG
• 1974 Deutscher Künstlerbund Berlin, Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, FRG
• 1975 Series System Method, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, FRG
• 1976 The Pure Form - From Malewitsch to Albers, McCrory Corp. Collection, New York and Art Museum, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 1977 art 8 art fair Basel with Galerie Teufel, Switzerland *
• 1977 documenta 6, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, FRG
• 1978 Abstract definition of space, National Gallery , Berlin, FRG
• 1978 McCrory Corporation New York Collection, Luisiana Museum, Humlebaeck
• 1980 art 11 art fair Basel, Switzerland
• 1980 Construction, structure, constellation, Teufel Gallery, Cologne, Germany
• 1980 1900 Talets Konstutveckling Belist Genom, Kunsthalle Malmö, Sweden
• 1981 Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition, Detroit, USA
• 1981 Construction in process, Lodz, Poland
• 1982 art 13 art fair Basel, Switzerland
• 1982 German graphics and drawings of the present, Museum Ludwig , Cologne, FRG
• 1982 Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition, Art Museum, Denver, USA
• 1983 Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition, San Antonio Museum of Art , Texas, USA
• 1983 Contemporary German graphics and drawings, Art Gallery of New South Wales , Sydney, Australia
• 1983 Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition, New Orleans Museum of Art , New Orleans, USA
• 1984 Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition, Indianapolis Museum of Art , Indianapolis
• 1984 German graphics and drawings of the present, artists' association, Oslo, Norway
• 1985 German graphics and drawings of the present, National Art Club, New York, USA
• 1985 Imaginer, Construire, Musée d'Art Moderne , Paris, France
• 1986 German graphics and drawing of the present, Arts Center, Hong Kong, China
• 1986 National Museum, Singapore
• 1986 Shoto Museum, Tokyo
• 1986 Trends in Geometric Abstract Art, The Tel Aviv Museum , Tel Aviv, Israel
• 1987 Mathematics in the Art of the Last Thirty Years, Wilhelm Hack Museum , Ludwigshafen, FRG
• 1989 art 20 art fair Basel, with Galerie Fesel, Basel, Switzerland
• 1992 Boundless, Contemporary Art in Exile, Bonn, Germany
• 1993 Boundless, Contemporary Art in Exile, Stuttgart, Germany
• 1994 Europa-Europa, The Century of the Avant-Garde in Central and Eastern Europe, Art and Exhibition Hall of the FRG, Bonn, Germany
• 1994 Hungarian Art of the 80s, Art Gallery , Budapest, Hungary
• 1997 Beyond Art, New Gallery at the Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria
• 1998 The infinite space expands, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany
• 1998 Universidad Simon Bolivar Museum, Galeria de Arte Caracas , Venezuela
• 2001 Ars Vivendi - Ars Moriendi, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany
• 2001 Reference systems, Edition & Galerie Hoffmann, Friedberg, Germany
• 2003 150 years of the Diözesanmuseum Cologne! Donations, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany
• 2005 Concrete Art in Europe after 1945 (Max Bill presentation), Kulturspeicher, Würzburg
• 2007 Of all things .... Mathematics and Concrete Art, Kulturspeicher, Würzburg, Germany
• 2009 Art Cologne, with Edition & Galerie Hoffmann, Friedberg, Germany
• 2011 Thinking, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany
• 2012 Raster search - The raster in art after 1945, Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, Germany
• 2013 Primary Structures, Galerie March, Stuttgart, Germany
• 2013 DRAWING.OK, VILTIN Galéria, Budapest, Hungary
• 2013 National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi - Mumbai - Bangalore, India
• 2013 ArtMarket Budapest, with VILTIN Galéria
• 2014 ARCOmadrid, with VILTIN Galéria
• 2014 Freihand, Center for Modern and Contemporary Art - MODEM, Debrecen, Hungary
• 2014 Artissima, with VILTIN Galéria, Torino, Italy
• 2015 ARCOmadrid, with VILTIN Galéria
• 2015 START Art Fair, London, with VILTIN Galéria
• 2016 ARCOmadrid, with VILTIN Galéria
• 2016 TEFAF Maastricht, with MAYOR Gallery London, Netherlands
• 2016 Art Basel, with MAYOR Gallery London, Switzerland
• 2017 TEFAF Maastricht, with MAYOR Gallery London, Netherlands
• 2017 Art Basel, with MAYOR Gallery London, Switzerland

Public collections

• City Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany
• Municipal art collections, Gelsenkirchen, Germany
• Municipal Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany
• Ministry of Culture of North Rhine-Westphalia, Düsseldorf, Germany
• Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn Germany
• Wilhelm Hack Museum , Ludwigshafen a. R., Germany
• Museum Ludwig , Cologne, Germany
• Museum Kunstpalast , Düsseldorf, Germany
• State Gallery Stuttgart , Germany
• Museum Wiesbaden , Germany
• Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland
• Museum of Concrete Art, Ingolstadt, Germany
• Art Information Center - University of Arts, Osaka, Japan
• Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany
• Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany
• Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
• City of Waldshut-Tiengen, Germany
• The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel
• Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, USA
• Amsterdam City Hall , Netherlands
• City of Wipperführung, Germany
• Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary
• Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Foundation, Germany
• Kiscelli Museum, Budapest, Hungary
• Kolumba Museum, art museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany
• Albertina, Vienna, Austria
• Janus Pannonius Museum, Pecs, Hungary
• From the Heydt Museum , Wuppertal, Germany
• Mondrianhuis, Amersfoort, Netherlands
• Museum Vass, Veszprém, Hungary
• Museum in the Kulturspeicher , Würzburg, Germany
• Allianz AG , Berlin, Germany
• Museum Ludwig , Budapest, Hungary
• Kunsthalle , Bremen, Germany
• Paks Picture Gallery, Paks, Hungary
• Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
• Art Museum Stuttgart Germany
• New Museum Nuremberg , Germany
• Museum Haus Konstruktiv , Zurich, Switzerland
• Schorndorf Hospital (garden fountain), Schorndorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Awards

• 2004 Mihály von Munkácsy Prize from the Hungarian Ministry of Culture, Budapest
• 1984 working grant, Kunstfonds eV, Bonn
• 1977 work grant from the BDI, Cologne
• 1975 scholarship for painting from the city of Cologne

Texts

Well-known art historians and philosophers, Klaus Honnef , Eugen Gomringer , Karl Ruhrberg , Walter Vitt , Dieter Ronte , Max Bense and Siegfried Maser , have published texts on the work of Attila Kovács.

Web links

• Website Attila Kovács
• Literature by and about Attila Kovács in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Documenta 6 catalog: Volume 1: Painting, Plastic / Environment, Performance, page 94, 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00-X
2. ↑ Kovács Attila, a képzőművész (1938-2017) - megemlékezés
3. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Full members of the German Association of Artists since it was founded in 1903 / Kovács, Attila ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on September 24, 2015)
4. ↑ On some paradoxes of form, Lóránd Hegyi Attila Kovács, accessed on January 12, 2014
5. ↑ Attila Kovács: A szellemi ember függetlensége , Budapest 1977, p. 171.
6. ↑ https://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta_6#
7. ↑ http://www.attilakovacs.hu/menu_de/6/14_visu.pdf
8. ↑ Exhibition cat. Operations, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel 196
9. ↑ today art, no.12, Milan 1975
10. ↑ Exhibition cat. AK Synthetic Sequences 1968 - 1995, Kunsthalle, Budapest 19
11. ^ Attila Kovács: visual, transformational 1977
12. ^ Wulf Herzogenrath Attila Kovács: An artist between the worlds , accessed on January 12, 2014.
13. ↑ Attila Kovács Bibliography , accessed on January 12, 2014.