Biography
István Mácsai was a student of Aurél Bernáth at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts between 1945-49. He studied in Italy, France and the Netherlands. From 1950 he was an exhibiting artist. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Hungary and abroad, including Cannes (1957), Engkien (1964), Florence (1972), Munich (1982) and Amsterdam (1984).
As a young man, he learned from his master to paint airy, loosely composed pictures with a light, post-Nagybánya Gresham brushwork; in the 1950s he also treated the social-realist theme in this way. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, his painting became more rigorous and austere: he developed an 'East-Central European hyperrealism', a form of painting that was related to hyperrealism, reminiscent of the West Coast version of America, with its symbolic elements, but still completely independent of it, a painting with a sociographic content, but also with a tendency towards magical charm. Its stylistic elements include the results of Constructivism, the concepts of Lowland painting and the free associations of Surrealism, but it is also based on a very tight, carefully balanced composition and a considered pictorial theme. From the very beginning, his works have been devoted to painting Budapest's urban districts, downtown streetscapes, apartment buildings, courtyards, bridges, traffic, and the time of day in the city. His Budapest-inspired works have won national and international recognition. An important part of his oeuvre is a large number of character portraits. Behind the surrealistic, photo-realistic, hyper-realistic painting and objective highlighting, his art is characterised by an emotional motivation.
His works can be found in Hungarian public collections, including the Hungarian National Museum and the Budapest Gallery, as well as in private collections.