Baby Face and Archipenko are two people of outstanding caliber and are almost public figures. One is a notorious American gangster and public enemy number one, and the other is the master of modern twentieth-century sculpture. They were contemporaries and lived on one continent. Yet, the element that links the two worlds is not the wallpaper-like motive system that runs between them but András KONCZ’s sometimes surrealistic associative technique of image-making, which allows the symbiosis of different worlds and layers.
András Koncz (1953-2024) was the dominant figure of Hungarian postmodernism. A year after his death, his solo exhibition at Viltin Gallery aims to draw a narrower arc of his oeuvre, from his early photographs of the 1970s to his large-scale paintings of the 1980s.
Koncz’s photographic and painting work are closely related. His photographs can be defined mainly as a field of the artistic and the media experimentation, and along the lines of self-reflexive gestures. Experimenting the genres of portraiture and self-portraiture appears in several of his works, as do sequential narratives. Koncz already began his creative activity as a college student in the mid-seventies.
The founding members of the Rózsa Circle – András Halász, Zsigmond Károlyi, Károly Kelemen, Lóránt Méhes, András Lengyel and Koncz – created an intellectual conceptual art reflecting the specific situation in Central Europe and Hungary. His minimalist, ephemeral works based on reflections, light phenomena or movement (Line Distraction, Line Transformation, both 1976) and his performances (Opening, 1982) are dated to this period. András Koncz’s photographs can be seen as both photographic works of art and documents, in which emblematic figures and locations of the art scene of the time appear.
Koncz’s painting combines the classical tradition with the stylistic features of the ‘new painting’ trends that emerged in the late 1970s. The Transavanguardia, associated with the renowned Italian theorist Achille Bonito Oliva, became one of the most important examples of postmodern culture in the early 1980s and became the focus of international art (Neue Wilden – Germany, New Painting – England, Neo-Expressivism – USA), breaking with the idea of an artistic process that was entirely oriented towards conceptual abstraction in the 1970s. The Transavantgarde revived painting and, with it, emotion, figurative art, and symbolism. The new art was not exclusionary; avant-garde and traditional, abstract and figurative coexisted.
In 1981, Lóránd Hegyi launched his biannual exhibition series, New Sensitivity, in Hungary. This series presented a new approach emerging in both the younger and older generations’ art. The national exhibitions were followed by internationals – Austria, Germany, Sweden – and the paintings of András KONCZ also entered the international scene.
Starting in the eighties, the big-size canvases he richly colored with broad gestures gained dominance. Sincere emotions bring the mythical and sometimes symbolic elements to the surface, which unite with ordinary life’s visuality, such as the emblematic figures of films and press photographs in the free-flowing spaces of his figurative narrative paintings. His paintings were the first examples of the appropriation gesture in Hungarian Transavantgarde/postmodernist paintings, often using the means of appropriation and motif borrowing. From the late 1980s until the end of his practice, he combined his paintings’ compositional and narrative elements, their superimposed layers, and spatial structure with a repetitive motive: wallpaper patterns.