It is difficult to classify Margaret Anna’s works as belonging to any one artistic movement; a significant part of her oeuvre can be best described along the lines of surrealism and expressive vision. Anna Margit created a unique formal language that made her one of the most outstanding figures of Hungarian painting. Her work is both sensual and ruthlessly clear-sighted, combining elegant decorativeness with an exploration of the soul.
Her lyrical, associative painting of the 1930s, based on Chagall’s methods, changed with the tragic death of her husband, the painter Imre Ámos, in 1944. In his works, painted within the framework of the European School, his puppets appear childlike, with huge heads, speaking for him and representing suffering that cannot be expressed on a human scale. In the 1950s and 1960s, absurd humour and mockery became increasingly important in his paintings.
“If you look at my pictures carefully, you will see that this is a bitter biography. No one is born bitter, but one becomes bitter when one has been given a life so hard that to go through it is like going to war.” Almost fifty years after his last exhibition, the exhibition of his life’s work at the Hungarian National Gallery presents this life and this life’s work through almost two hundred works of art.