Manipulator (1972)

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.

The recurring elements of Kováts' oeuvre are labyrinths, networks, intricately drawn, large enclosing forms with a multitude of winding lines, dots and dots within their contours. "Both forms are associated with the mystery, the inscrutable, with the subtle difference that the network tends to conceal, while the labyrinth hides," writes Judit Szeifert. From a distance, the tiny details sometimes give the impression of an archaeological dig or a church or palace floor plan, at other times they seem to be assembled into a human head. The intricate, branching, opaque, mysterious and oppressive networks and labyrinths symbolise the twists and turns of life. Kováts' work represents a kind of organic surrealism. The Manipulator (1972) is unusual in this respect, for here the multiplied or extended limbs of a built, constructive structure plunge fearsomely into the sky. It is relatively easy to recognise the man 'pulling the strings'.