Woman in Green Hat with Cat (1939)

Magda Zemplényi began her artistic studies in the mid-1930s at the free school of Vilmos Aba-Novák. From the late 1930s she participated in exhibitions at the Ernst Museum, the KUT and the OMIKE Art Action. In 1938 she was awarded the honorary distinction of the Szinyei Society. 'Magda Zemplényi, obsessed with the Gothic exaltation of Greco and Matisse, has produced material that is considerably more serious than the average woman painter,' praised the Esti Újság in April 1938. In 1944, she married the painter Gyula Marosán, with whom she joined the group of artists that was formed after the war under the name of the European School. Her first collective exhibition, with a foreword by Imre Pán and Endre Bálint, was held in 1945 at the MKP headquarters. 'The young artist's restless and unsettling material will not easily win the sympathy of the average gallery-goer. They will be confronted with a strange world, a world whose mysteries are not accessible by well-trodden paths, whose unusual colour and formal schemes will only allow the viewer, who lives between intellectual and material conventions, to approach them at the cost of certain struggles. This exhibition was not put together in the spirit of absolute beauty, but in the spirit of a willful and impatient struggle', wrote Lajos Kassák Kassák in Új Idők in 1945 about Zemplényi's exhibition. 

Zemplényi's first period was influenced by French painting between the two world wars (Matisse, Picasso and especially the figurative and non-figurative movements of surrealism) and German expressionism (e.g. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Hackel, Kees van Dongen). In Hungary at this time, almost no one was using colour and distorting shapes, forms or even herself as boldly as she did. The quotations above are a reference to this. She painted a number of self-portraits, which are rather symbolic. The Woman in the Green Hat is like this, where Zemplényi depicts herself in nudity with a small white animal (cat, sheep, dog?) between her arms. Her femininity is accentuated by the circular shapes (ascending from the top to the bottom), which divide the figure into three parts, and the rounded curves, creating the silhouette of a guitar. The well-known iconographic theme of the 'Madonna with Child' is profaned by Zemplényi in several ways.

Her artistic legacy has come to the fore in recent years. Her works can be found in the Modern Hungarian Gallery in Pécs and in private collections.