Renewal of figurative art in the 1960s

The aim of the exhibition is to present a scientific experiment and its use in an artistic endeavour. The sculptor István Bencsik (931-) met Ferenc Kováts Jr.(1913-1997), the Kossuth prize winning medical professor, in 1968. At the time the latter was charting, by means of a photographic surveying procedure, the changes in the shape of the human chest while breathing. Bencsik made the three dimensional models representing breathing. However, instead of models he created works of art and become a sculptor working in a different way. The artist was faced with the task of representing living human beings. During his years at the Fine Arts Academy (1951-57), his vision was brought into line with socialist realism, but now he had to make a survey of the proportions of the human chest. By means of the peculiarities of this system, which was able to survey people in motion, he discovered the special relationship to artistic reality of the different units that make up the human body; this allowed him to arrive at a possible way of representing authentic figures and fragments of figures. The lessons he learned from the medical system are determining factors in his art: he picks out geometric sections of body parts, magnifies them, using various materials and has perfected this technique in his works such as Europe, the Madonna, Penelope and the Genesis series which is in progress.