Szentendre can’t complain that the Muses have visited the town only rarely in the last hundred years. The settlement of the Réti students in 1926 and the founding of the Szentendre Painters’ Society sparked the interest of artists in this small town with its Mediterranean atmosphere and unique scenery. Many of today’s classic artists visited the town, which was already known as the “town of painters” in the 1930s, and many of them even settled here. The area, which was home to the artists’ colony known as the Old Artists’ Colony, has seen regular changes in its population since 1945.
So there was no shortage of painters when, in the late 1960s, the decision was taken to build another artists’ colony in Szentendre on Kálváriadomb. By the autumn of 1969, the new studio apartments were completed on the fenced plot of land sloping down towards the city centre, and were allocated on the basis of a decision by the Ministry of Culture and the Association of Hungarian Artists to members of the generation of painters, mainly born in the 1930s, including married couples. Tamás Asszonyi, a sculptor, and his wife Piroska Jávor, a painter, were the youngest members of the 15-strong group.
No real political affiliation was needed to win the studios, nor were there any stylistic links between the artists who moved here. Perhaps they were simply nurtured in the hope that they would become pillars of socialist art. Fortunately, despite the expectations, each artist managed to find their own language. In addition, the New Artists’ Colony in Kálváriadomb has provided a relaxed atmosphere for decades for the artists who have settled here, so it is safe to call it the Parnassus of Szentendre.
Piroska Jávor moved to the site immediately after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts. Initially attracted by the decorative qualities of needle enamelling, she also experimented with tapestry making, but eventually chose painting as her medium of expression. In the decades of art in Szentendre, geometric non-figurativity and constructive image-making emerged as one of the striking aspirations.
Piroska Jávor created her own version of this line. Initially, her breathy watercolours evoked floating formations hidden in the depths of the consciousness, sometimes with object-like references. Then, in his oil paintings, he gave personality to geometric shapes with whimsical loops, while the precise elaboration of the background or ground, which obscures any hand gesture, gives an intellectual touch to the personal.
Over the past 20 years or so, the world of form has become more crystalline, with an increased playfulness in regular geometric elements and mathematical relationships. Letters and numbers have become both meaningful shapes and rhythmic forms. And colours can almost be interpreted as the beats of visual melodies. The material in Piroska Jávor’s new exhibition is primarily a selection of works from the last two decades.