Gyula Czimra is one of the most unique artists in the history of 20th century Hungarian painting. He was a lonely and solitary painter with a peculiar character, but the high quality and clarity of his works place him among the most important Hungarian artists of his time. The large-scale exhibition presents nearly half of the artist’s oeuvre – paintings, sculptures, prints and tapestries – and almost 180 works.
Gyula Czimra worked as a technical draughtsman and attended evening classes at the School of Applied Arts. From 1923 he lived and studied in Paris, and in 1926 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Zodiaque in Paris. His trip to France was followed by stays in Nagybánya and Szentendre, and in 1934 he settled in Rákoshegy with his wife, where he lived for the rest of his life. From the second half of the 1940s until his death, he painted in almost total seclusion. The majority of his works were produced in the 1920s and 1930s and 1950s and 1960s; by international standards, he produced a significant part of his oeuvre in the last ten years of his life.
The exhibition presents the oeuvre in six sections. The first section focuses on the years between 1924 and 1928, when Czimra worked in Paris and Barbizon with his friends Jenő Paizs Goebel, Ernő Jeges and Albert Varga. It was at this time that the theme of the studio emerged in his painting, a theme that he later reformulated many times. The second section presents his period in Szentendre between 1929 and 1933. It was then that the influence of the works of Paul Gauguin in Basel and Vincent van Gogh in Paris came to bear: Czimra’s paintings became more colourful and the colourful structure of the view, broken down into units of colour, defined his work.
Between 1938 and 1954 Czimra retired from painting. In the years between 1955 and 1957, he created the foundations of his later great style: a geometric composition reduced to a few colours and a geometric, clear composition, and almost empty pictures of the narrow home. During his great period up to 1960, he produced the most important works of his oeuvre. His increasingly small but highly concentrated paintings of the home; his somewhat naïve but still focused on the structure of the landscape; and his still lifes and interiors. The final section shows the period between 1960 and 1965 when Czimra’s painting moved towards total abstraction. The walls of the apartment became planes of colour, objects disappeared from the spaces of the home, and his paintings reached the point of total simplification.
The exhibition covers all the periods of his oeuvre: the works produced between 1924 and 1965 cover a wide range from Romantic Realism to Post-Impressionist, Fauve and then Naïve Art, and later through Novecento to Decorative Realism, Symbolist-Metaphysical, Geometric, Puritan sculptural and still life paintings, radiating total purity. Czimra’s most distinctive paintings are the small-scale paintings of his home in his final years. These mostly empty interiors, with only a single chair or table, do not evoke the scenes of real, everyday life, but create a kind of contemplative world, removed from reality.
The title of the exhibition – Without shadow – is suggestive and ambiguous: on the one hand, it refers to the compositions defined by clear outlines, the absence of illusory plasticity, the absence of shadow, the evocation of an almost sacral silence. On the other hand, it refers to the artist: a straight, pure man who lived without shadows and who, because of his restraint and his distance from artistic life, seemed to be in the shadows. By presenting the creative process, the patterns of artistic thought and the history of his oeuvre, the artist can now finally step out of the shadows.