Sine loco et anno – Tamás Konok, the internationally recognized Hungarian artist, represented by the gallery, passed away to a space- and timeless sphere at dawn on the 21th November 2020. His conscious and professional creative activity, high intellect and kind personality leaves an irreplaceable and painful hiatus behind him.
His art is a milestone in the history of Hungarian and European geometric abstract painting, and his pictorial compositions, based on flat structures and thin lines, lends a unique atmosphere to his artworks, characteristic only for him. His life and artistic practice was a role model for generations of young painters.
His unforgettable personality and memory will live forever. God rest his soul!
Tamás Konok was born in 1930 in Budapest. He graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where his master was Aurél Bernáth. He moved to Paris in 1959 and later he also had a studio in Zurich. While maintaining his residence in Paris, he has been also living and working in Budapest since the 1990s. Konok’s first solo exhibition was at the Galerie Lambert in Paris in 1960. He had his first museum solo exhibition in Stedelijk in the Netherlands in 1964, afterwards he also had a solo show at the Lausanne Museum in Switzerland. In 1983 Konok’s works appeared at the Geometrische Abstraktion exhibition together with those of J. Albers, F. Morellet and F. Picabia. He collaborated with Galerie Schlégl in Switzerland and exhibited his works several times at the Basel Art-Expo. Konok had solo exhibitions at numerous important institutions in Hungary since the eighties, among them the Xantus János Museum in Győr and the Museum of Fine Arts (together with his artist wife, Katalin Hetey), he had retrospective exhibitions at the Ludwig Museum (1995) and the Ernst Museum (2006). Several state awards attest to the recognition of his work: he is the Knight of the National Order of the French Republic (1997) and is a holder of the Kossuth Prize (1998) as well as the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic (2004). Konok’s works can be found, among others, in the collection of the Städtische Galerie in Hamburg, the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bern, the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, the Hungarian National Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. In December he will have a retrospective exhibition at the Ludwig Museum – Contemporary Art Museum Budapest and a solo exhibition at Ani Molnár Gallery.
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