In Memoriam G. J. (1981)

Albert Kováts attended a free school from 1954, but was arrested in 1956 and served two years in prison. An exhibiting artist from 1961, his early works were iconic, magical images that paid homage to the memory of Lajos Vajda and emphasised his ties to the Hungarian surrealist tradition. In 1967 he had his first solo exhibition at the Fényes Adolf Hall. It was here that he presented his first "ancestral Ubu", influenced by Paul Klee's Senecio. Alfred Jarry's King Übü was to become the central theme of his later art, whose grotesque title character became for him the Dictator puppet, laden with allusions to the Kádár era. 'The Kafkaesque dimension of anxiety and the grin of Dadaism meet in Kováts' Übü paintings', wrote Éva Forgács. In the seventies, he was an illustrator for the Rakéta Regényújság and published a small book entitled A rajz (Drawing). He was already experimenting with collage, but the real impetus came from a Max Ernst exhibition in Paris. Between 1980 and 1985, he mainly made collages, mostly on a black background with white line drawings, and paid particular attention to the joints to create an effect similar to that of the engravings. In addition to his work as a painter, he has been writing and publishing articles on art and urban history since 1991.

Albert Kováts was sentenced in 1956 to two years in prison. In prison, his cellmate, the writer József Gáli, who was also imprisoned, was an editor and later a member of the resistance group at the Sándor Péterfy Street Hospital during the revolution. Gáli was initially sentenced to death, but escaped the verdict. When he died in 1981, Kováts created the graphic work In Memoriam G. J. as a hommage to him.