Biography
Béla Gruber is a painter and graphic designer. Interrupting his high school studies, he worked as a helper at the Óbuda Shipyard, then as a decorator before being admitted to the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts in 1956, where he was first a student of György Kádár, and later János Kmetty and Aurél Bernáth. He died before completing his studies, but his legacy is still rich, consisting of about a thousand works, including his famous diploma thesis entitled Painter's Room, which remained unfinished.
In Gruber's pictures, he reconstructs and constructs the depicted material world in the constructive style that developed following Cézanne's and Hungarian antecedents in the twentieth century. In his compositions, his objects are delimited by strong contours, and he places his picture planes in illusionistic spatial systems.
From 1964 to the present day, posthumous exhibitions of his works were organized in several places: in 1978, his works were presented at the Hungarian National Gallery, and in 1993, at the Academy of Fine Arts.
