Mining region (1960)

Miklós Somos attended the Academy of Fine Arts between 1951-1957, where his teacher was Géza Fónyi. He participated in national exhibitions from the mid-fifties. His individual style, which Géza Perneczky called lyrical realism, was related to constructivist painting and developed in the early 1960s. His suggestive paintings are characterised by a strong plasticity in relief, a tight structure, closed simplified forms and a reduced use of colour. In his works, landscapes, nudes and portraits, he goes beyond the specific features of reality. His paintings can be compared to those of Jenő Barcsay, Endre Domanovszky and Béla Kondor. In 1963 he also made ceramic paintings in Hódmezővásárhely. In the early seventies his painting was renewed. Instead of gloomy scenes, he painted cubo-surrealistic spaces and still lifes with a colourful palette, and by the 1980s his works had become even more relaxed. 

Mining region belongs to Miklós Somos's mining pictures of Egercseh, which the artist painted as a Derkovits fellow in 1960. "The artist spent three months among the miners of Egercseh, he did not come to 'look' for a subject, but wanted to get to know the miners, the simple people in work clothes, boots and boots", wrote Népújság in 1961. Somos is interested in the utterly simplified forms of nature and the environment, which he usually keeps flat. His world is an enclosed world, a world of nature shaped around man, a world of man-shaped, man-made landscapes. Nature never becomes hostile - on the contrary, it always adapts to the scale of the figure, embracing him. His early paintings are characterised by a rustic surface treatment and the use of earth tones.