Gábor Attalai was one of the most important artists of the Hungarian artistic generation of the early 1960s. At the beginning of his career, after graduating from the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1958, he created abstract paintings loosely connected to the Zugló Circle, but also to the Paris School, and very early on he became a key figure in Hungarian textile art: in 1968 he organized the exhibition Textile Wall Painting ’68 at the Ernst Museum.
His felt sculptures and space textiles were often linked to the international lineage of minimal art, often evoking folk art traditions. In the second half of the 1960s, Attalai was confronted with the phenomenon of the ‘neglect’ of art, and his conceptual work, which was parallel to his ‘official’ textile art and also saturated with political references, became increasingly important. He created works linked to body art, land art, mail art and project art, environments, photographic works, collages, text works and so-called “red-y made” works.
The exhibition at Dubniczay Palace and the accompanying publication present a selection of Attalai’s conceptual works. These are the works that made the artist part of international networks at an extremely early stage.
“My generation was somehow oriented towards the West,” said Attalai, who entered the artistic circuits of the period by post: He sent his conceptual works in envelopes to fellow artists in the West and asked for information about contemporary art, corresponding with artists such as Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns and John Chamberlain, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Carolee Schneemann, Sol LeWitt, Christo, Hanne Darboven, Richard Long, John Baldessari, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Anthony Caro, Robert Filliou, Claude Viallat, Joseph Kosuth and Dennis Oppenheim.
All of these artists are represented in Attalai’s archives, and he has sometimes received publications and works of art from them. He also had contacts with curators such as Harald Szeemann. Attalai’s work as an art writer was also outstanding, publishing highly important theoretical texts on the changing concept of art, which are also of great help in the theoretical and historical contextualisation of the artist’s work.
Since the second half of the 1980s, Attalai has gradually withdrawn from the national and international art public, and his art is now waiting to be rediscovered. The presentation of certain segments of Attalai’s oeuvre can be revelatory not only from the point of view of art historical research on the ‘long 60s’, which seeks to go beyond the simplistic separation of ‘supported, tolerated and prohibited’ phenomena, but also from the perspective of the study of the global flow of information and the functioning of networking. In the light of Attalai’s oeuvre, which was present in various (official and unofficial) publics and created a significant network of international contacts, certain strands of the history of Hungarian and Central and Eastern European art in the 1960s and 1970s may also be shed new light.