Tamás Konok

Annely Juda Fine Art is delighted to announce its first exhibition of Hungarian artist Tamás Konok (1930-2020), charting the work of this pioneering abstract artist from the period of the 1970s up to his death in 2020. The exhibition will be in our third floor galleries and will run from 20^th March – 3 May 2025. 

Tamás Konok’s paintings confront fundmental questions regarding the space, time and structure of the image in a nonfigurative, formal language. With a decades-long commitment to image composition, Konok is recognised as a pioneer of Hungarian geometric and lyrical abstraction. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Konok begain his career as a figurative artist.  Having graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1953, he travelled to Paris in 1958 where he would relocate in the following year. It was here that he was introduced to the possibilities of abstraction through the work of Endre Rozsda and sculptor Lajos Barta, amongst others, with his first solo exhibition at Galerie Lambert, Paris in 1960.

1967-8, however, marks a turning point in his practice; his motifs become more organized, more rectilinear and his organic forms acquire a more geometrical character. From the beginning of the seventies, line-based transparent structures appear in his works, which unfold during the decade into purely abstract compositions. Konok used an array of geometric motifs and painted his compositions in more variations from this time, aiming for the expression of transcendence. For Konok, art was a way of entering another dimension and accessing other realms, be they painterly or otherwise.  He would speak about his work in relation to questions of existence, devoting special attention to the coordinated study of line and space, and later sign systems. The last trend in his oeuvre is a powerful series of paintings with stripes of solid colour arranged into pyramidal or other geometric shapes, such as Pyramidal (2017).

Konok took his first steps towards nonfigurative art when other twentieth-century artists were dominated by movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art. More akin to principles one might associate with early twentieth-century movements such as De Stijl, his life’s work is one of integrity and steadfast commitment to absolute abstraction.

Recognised during his lifetime, in 1964, Konok was given the opportunity to have a solo exhibition at Stedelijk Museum in Rotterdam. In 1983, his works appeared at the Geometrische Abstraktion exhibition at Galerie Schlégl, Zurich together with those of  Albers, Morellet and Picabia. Konok had solo exhibitions at numerous venues in Hungary since the 1980s, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, and he had retrospective exhibitions at the Ludwig Museum, Hungary (1995, 2021) and the Ernst Museum, Hungary (2006). 

Konok has received numerous awards in his lifetime, having been awarded the Kossuth Prize, the Prima Primissima Prize, and the Knight of the National Order of Merit of the French Republic. Konok’s works can be found, among others, in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Rotterdam, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bern, the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur, the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 2024, three of his paintings were acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. 

In 2023, the Konok-Hetey Art Award was established to recognize Hungarian painters and sculptors over the age of 35 who carry forward the traditions of geometric abstraction. Having lived and worked in both Paris and Zurich, Konok returned to Budapest in the 1990s where he remained until his death in 2020.

Tamás Konok: Line & Space is presented in collaboration with Ani Molnár Gallery, Budapest.