The exhibition will be opened by Domokos Kosáry, regular member and former president of the Hungarian Academy of Scienses, permanent patron of the Széchényi Academy of Literature and the ArtsCsaba Horváth, mayor of Budapest's 2nd Dis
curators of the exhibition: Gábor Andrási, Gábor Pataki This is a festive occasion with which Mũcsarnok salutes the eighth decade in the career of the doyen of Hungarian visual arts.
101 years old and still active, Tamás Lossonczy graduated at the Budapest Academy of Art in 1926, as a student of Vaszary. Upon travelling to Paris and Amsterdam, he gained first-hand experience of the fermenting art life of the period, became an eye-witness of the birth of Constructivism. It was by the late 1930’s that he found his own voice, creating non-figurative compositions both ethereally subtle and dramatically expressive, making him all of a sudden one of the most important representatives of the so-called Bio-Romanticism.
Though most of his works were destroyed during WWII, he hurled himself with great vigour into the reviving art scene between 1945-1948; as a member of the Hungarian section of the European School and then of the Abstract Group, he created a number of massive compositions and sensitive experiments. Protean as an artist, he could evoke the horrors of the war together with the hope of a new beginning, and while some of his pictures teem with motives, in others the means of expression are reduced to a few circles. By the 1950’s he seems to have exhausted his inventive resources, and it was with great difficulty that he finished, in 1962, the work that was to sum up his activity to that point, the large Tisztító nagy vihar (Great Storm Cleanses), which is also a memento of the 1956 revolution.
He has been working with fantastic energy ever since, with an unwavering faith in the improving power of independent artistic creation.
Most of his work is comprised of cycles addressing given artistic-creative problems. An attitude that acknowledges conflicting positions, and an uninhibited mode of composition that freely unites the most varied elements make him one of the most original and versatile non-figurative artists, one whose position and approach is almost post-modern.
The exhibition features the most important and exciting works to give a notion of the richness of this extraordinary career. There will be several works on display which the public has had little or no chance to see, borrowed for the occasion from museums, local and foreign private collections. A catalogue will be published, a beautiful selection from the oeuvre, which will later be followed by a collection of studies devoted to Tamás Lossonczy’s work.