László Iványi’s art during the period from 1958 to 1975 was characterized primarily by works on paper. Initially, he used graphite and gray underpainting, then increasingly incorporated color; his surfaces featured figures symbolizing the human form, evoking the imagery of cave paintings.
His major work, *No Bedroom for Miss Doude*, painted in 1967, with its complex world of space and form and its creative reflection on French artistic influences—specifically the colorful and linear forms of Jean Dubuffet and Niki de Saint Phalle—rightfully earned a place at the Paris Biennale of that time and in our current exhibition. The nearly three-meter-tall painting is an exciting, colorful composition in which peculiar, floating, surreal forms fill the space marked by multicolored walls.
Alongside this outstanding work, the exhibition also presents several other examples of the artist’s early abstract experiments. In addition to his dark-toned works on paper, Iványi also experimented with vividly colored painting. These paintings further developed the tradition of 20th-century abstract art: he rendered compositions formed from irregular shapes using pastel colors and a free-flowing brushstroke.
By introducing László Iványi, we are integrating a previously unknown, exceptionally talented, and distinctive artist from the Hungarian diaspora into the rich historical panorama of Hungarian art in exile.