Male Portrait (1931)

Borbereki was born in Rónaszék, Transylvania, and fled the Romanian occupation to Budapest, where he became a carpenter due to the harsh conditions of the time. After working all day, he studied drawing at Podolini-Volkman's school. After applying twice, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1928, where he was initially a student of Vaszary. From his third year he became a student of Csók and began to study painting seriously. In 1932 he took part in the Venice Biennale, the following year he was awarded a scholarship to Rome, and in 1933 his first collection exhibition was held at the Ernst Museum. In the autumn of 1934 - with a Hungarian scholarship - he returned to Rome again and studied fresco painting at the Academy under the tutelage of Master Ferazzi. In recognition of his work, at the "Arte Disegni" exhibition, the Mayor of Rome bought his ink drawing "Roman Landscape" for the city museum. 

He was then invited to the art school in Szolnok, where he began to make sculptures under the encouragement of Vilmos Aba-Novák, and achieved almost immediate success with his very first sculptures. His "Shepherd Boy with Cows" (1936) can be seen in the Hungarian National Gallery, and his bronze sculpture "Hungarian Peasant" is exhibited in Szentes, with which he won the Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition of Fine Arts. Towards the end of the decade, Borberek's formal language gradually became more and more clear-cut, and his "Hungarian Golgotha" and "Portrait of my Wife" point towards his later non-figurative period. After the Second World War, he threw himself into public art life with renewed vigour: he organised a free school and took up positions in the Association of New Artists and the Rippl-Rónai Society. However, he was disappointed by the political turn of events and moved with his wife to Italy and then, with the help of Sándor Kónya, to South Africa in the spring of 1950. There he became a world-famous sculptor, only returning home for exhibitions in 1970 and 1982. 

Borberek's early Portrait of a Man (1931) does not show the influence of his masters (Vaszary, Csók), but rather his independent style, characterized by a tendency to reduction, compression, strict formulation and expressiveness. Nevertheless, the plasticity of the face is not indicative of his later sculpture, but rather of the documentary approach characteristic of Kassák's Munka circle and the formal vision of French cubism.