Composition (Around 1970)

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.

In contrast to the harmony of circular and curved or other closed shapes in Kováts' drawing, most of the internal shapes are broken. The larger block-like parts branch out into several directions. The full form is usually broken up or fragmented by a single drawing element: the clash between the conflicting forms is ultimately resolved in a dynamic balance, a unity of opposites. The pair of opposites of out and in, of height and depth, is combined into one, in such a way that the different points of view are shown simultaneously, but also in their total unity, in an almost mystical way. In contrast to the surface modelling that is usually the norm, Kováts' drawings are largely dominated by white surfaces. He is sparing with his point and line structures, but where he makes use of them, they are rich and varied in a way that is in keeping with nature. A decisive characteristic of the formal world of Kováts' paintings is that each detail, and often the paintings as a whole, is situated on the borderland of apperception, on the borderland of the recognisable. It can be either a top view of a landscape or the plan of a church with a triple nave.