Untitled (1960s)

He was one of the most versatile and prolific artists of 20th-century Hungarian art - painter, graphic artist, illustrator, sculptor, teacher - but his oeuvre has been only sporadically discussed in Hungarian art history. His works from the late 1920s reveal the lessons of almost all the isms. The influences of the surrealists, constructivists, abstracts and purists are expressed in synthesis or in the representative pictorial solutions of a particular movement. His art was an integral part of the modern art scene of the period between the two world wars and up to the year of the turnaround (1948). He was a well-known artist under the socialist regime, a featured and official artist at the Venice Biennale, a multiple Kossuth Prize winner. In the 1960s he returned to his avant-garde roots not only in his works but also in his personal connections. A significant part of his legacy was transferred to Vác in several stages during the 1980s, but Hincz's works can be found in numerous public and private collections, public institutions and, in recent years, at auctions. 

Hincz first encountered the avant-garde movements (surrealism, constructivism, etc.) on his European tour in 1926. Playfulness, dynamism, rhythm of colour, organic and geometric forms, decorativeness are the main characteristics of Hincz's particular style, which he aptly called "amoebaism". With his tempera paintings of this period, he was closely linked to the abstract European trends that were flourishing in the second half of the 1920s. Later, many of the motifs that emerged here recur in Hincz's later non-figurative periods (which is often why it is difficult to date Hincz's works precisely). In the 1960s, he reimagined works that had been lost or never made in the 1920s. After the greyish, brownish paintings of the 1950s, his palette became more colourful again, and his works of this period are characterised by a complex pictorial sentence structure, a swarm of forms, a drifting formal rhythm and a new interpretation of space. 

The watercolour shown here is reminiscent of Hincz's glass mosaics, in which the themes of science and technology allowed him to create almost entirely abstract concepts. The modern symbol of the working man in Egyptian paintings appears among the latticed, rotating structures, and it is as if the plant world is gradually becoming robotic.