Imre Bak

Budapest, Székesfehérvár, solo exhibition, Kétszer tizenöt / Twice fifteen, 1999, illustrated p. 29
Budapest, MEO Kortárs Művészeti Gyűjtemény, új mechanizmus - művek a hatvanas-hetvenes évekből / new mechanism - works from the sixties-seventies, 2001

Istvan Hajdu, Imre Bak,  Budapest, 2004, no. 16, pp. 25 & 231, illustrated

Imre Bak is part of the group of young ‘self-educated’ Hungarian contemporary artists from the 1960s for whom films from the French Institute showing works by Monet, Matisse and Derain, and then a  Skira book on Braque proofed veritable ‘eye-openers’ to a new world of colour and form. Departing from the drab browns and greys of Hungarian realism and historicism of 19^th century painters such as Munkacsy or Benczur, Bak was strongly inspired by the vivid palette of Impressionism and the forms of Cubism in his formative years. In 1962 Bak travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg, where he saw for the first time at first hand works by Matisse, Picasso, Leger and Kandinski. Trips to Poland and Germany followed, and Bak became increasingly attracted to geometrical abstract, hard edge painting. Inspired by the German concretists, the signal artists and American and British representatives of geometrical abstraction and pop art, Bak focused on non-figurative painting, exploring both strong, pure colour and strictly structured, sharp forms and lines in his works.  By fusing the universal symbolism of European and Central American cultures with some of the lessons he drew from conceptual art, Imre Bak fashioned a unique form of emblematic representation in his works from the 1970s.

‘The aims of Imre Bak, Istvan Nadler and later Janos Fajo determined at a very early stage the attempt to create a decidedly Hungarian form of neo-geo painting modified by the characteristics of Hungarian folk art.’ (István Hajdu, Imre Bak, 2004,p. 16). Works from this period, such as Breaking out,  redefined colour intensity based interpretation with their brightness.

With the help of Dieter Honisch Bak received a grant to spend a few weeks at the Folkwang museum in Essen in 1971, where his common motif became the German Fachwerk architecture. Departing from his generally bright colours he subsequently entered a period of executing black and white panels (see lot 162).