Painters (1964)

Albert Kováts attended a free school from 1954, but was arrested in 1956 and served two years in prison. An exhibiting artist from 1961, his early works were iconic, magical images that paid homage to the memory of Lajos Vajda and emphasised his ties to the Hungarian surrealist tradition. In 1967 he had his first solo exhibition at the Fényes Adolf Hall. It was here that he presented his first "ancestral Ubu", influenced by Paul Klee's Senecio. Alfred Jarry's King Übü was to become the central theme of his later art, whose grotesque title character became for him the Dictator puppet, laden with allusions to the Kádár era. 'The Kafkaesque dimension of anxiety and the grin of Dadaism meet in Kováts' Übü paintings', wrote Éva Forgács. In the seventies, he was an illustrator for the Rakéta Regényújság and published a small book entitled A rajz (Drawing). He was already experimenting with collage, but the real impetus came from a Max Ernst exhibition in Paris. Between 1980 and 1985, he mainly made collages, mostly on a black background with white line drawings, and paid particular attention to the joints to create an effect similar to that of the engravings. In addition to his work as a painter, he has been writing and publishing articles on art and urban history since 1991.

This early large-scale painting by Kováts seems to deal with one of the popular themes of the period, the working subject, in that it shows three painters at work. But here we already find a contradiction, for these men are not at work: the squatting man may be stirring the paint, but the one next to him is smoking a cigarette in a resigned manner, while the third turns his head towards the wall. The latter also differs from his colleagues in that he wears a black bowler hat on his head. As in his iconic paintings, Kováts is puritanical in his use of form and colour, relying on the essentials. He replaces the gold background of the icons with a reddish orange, which frames the white (see newsprint) and the skin colour of the figures. There are other oddities: there is a single brush on the floor, but it is not suitable for wall painting; the room's pepita is not depicted in perspective, making the space completely flat; only the face of a single male figure is visible. The events and figures in the painting may be symbolic of Kovács's relationship with painting. After all, he did not follow the traditional path of artist training (see the theme of the easel), the wall has to be painted over and over again (see background as canvas), and the man in the bowler hat could be a reference to money or politics, which are not lost on art.