At the very end of the 70s, when I first had the opportunity to write about Tamás Hencze’s artwork, and again in the early 2000s, when he commissioned me to write a monograph on his oeuvre, he considered his own written and photographic works from around 1971-72 so dull that not only did he omit them from the illustrations, but did not even mention them in these writings, with the exception of one piece, Underberg/Underground which I had already been familiar with from earlier times. It was only after his death, when Árpád Tóth started with exploring his estate that the world could learn about these works. There were not many of them and they cannot be considered really decisive regarding his career, nevertheless, these are interesting pieces which were created by an artist who was keeping with the spirit of the times and can be compared with similar works by Henze’s peers without hesitation. When creating these works, Hencze in fact adapted, or rather tried to subject himself to the rules of the prevailing international trends; at the same time his pieces also corresponded to the general air of disobedience the practitioners of conceptual gestures have generally relied on to escape the rigid criteria of orthodox, strictly theoretical artists.
István Hajdu