Biography
In 1948, he graduated from the Czuczor Gergely Bencés High School. From 1945 to 1950, he studied at the Conservatory of Music in Győr. In 1953, he graduated from the painting department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. He settled in Paris in 1959 and received French citizenship in 1970. From 1971 to 1974, he created works related to architecture, reliefs, sculptures, and murals. In 1980, his first exhibition in Hungary opened at the Museum of Fine Arts with Katalin Hetey. Since 1992, he has been a titular university professor at the Budapest University of Technology.
His painting is a defining part of modern Hungarian art. After completing his studies, he initially worked in a figurative style. As a result of his six-month scholarship in Paris in 1958, he tried to combine natural and abstract forms of expression. In 1959-1960, he visited Paris again, and this led to another change in the way he painted the road. He mainly created line-based monotypes, the structure of which is similar to collages. The lyrical, non-figurative representation that defines his art developed in the early 70s. Constructivist traditions were very strong in modern Hungarian fine art (Lajos Kassák, László Moholy-Nagy), which came to the fore again at the end of the 60s when combined with hard-edge gel (Imre Bak, János Fajó, István Nádler). Konok did not draw from this tradition, but thanks to his reliefs made for buildings, he developed a more lyrical and loose expression of the style. In the summer of 1983, he appeared in the Geometrische Abstraktion show in Zurich, where prestigious representatives of the trend such as J. Albers, A. Herbin, F. Morellet, F. Picabia, etc. presented themselves.
Geometric elements of different sizes appeared in his harmoniously colored, thin-lined, elaborately painted pictures (Painting on a gray background, 1975; Accent, 1976). The superimposed layers, the basic texture, the geometric shapes and the network of lines have a form- and composition-building role in them (Prélude, 1994; Sign, 1998).