Composition (1980)

István Nádler attended the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts between 1958-1963, where his teacher was Gyula Hincz. He was a member of the Zugló Circle, which was founded around 1958-1959. The group of friends - Imre Bak, Pál Deim, Sándor Molnár, András Molnár, István Pikier, Endre Hortobágyi - met regularly in Sándor Molnár's studio and later in his apartment in Zugló. Hence the group's later name. Their activities were divided into three parts: their first task was to produce information on contemporary art, and their interest was primarily in the European avant-garde tradition, focusing on the various ways of abstraction. The translation of 'basic books' such as Kandinsky's On the Spirit in Art and Point and Line on the Plane, Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook, Malevich's The World without Objects, Mondrian's Natural reality and abstract reality. Another task of the self-education circle was to learn and 'cultivate' the various styles, not merely theoretically, but through actual practice. As a third component, the society organised studio visits to the studios of the older generation of domestic 'abstract' artists, who were still only sporadically seen in exhibitions. In the early 1960s, Nádler made his works under the influence of lyrical abstraction, culminating in the 1963 painting Niké, which can be compared to the dark, dynamic colour palette of Pierre Soulages and Jean-Paul Riopelle. 

In 1964, he went on a study trip to France with Imre Nádler Bak, where they painted at the artists' colony in Vence. They saw the Venice Biennale that year, where American Pop Art was a huge success. Then, in West Germany, they encountered the latest new geometric trends, minimal art and hard edge. Back home, Nádler gradually developed his new style. He broke with the informal style of painting and began to compose with sharply defined plastic motifs built on the collision of homogeneous fields of colour painted impersonally, without internal nuance. Flat geometric shapes and motifs taken from folk art and archaic art become the vehicles of specific movements in Nádler's paintings. Between 1965 and 1972, his paintings are associated with the work of the American artists Nicholas Krushenick, Allan D'Arcangelo and the Japanese-born Kumi Sugai, in that Nádler was concerned with the tradition rather than the objectivity of his motifs. As an important member of the neo-avant-garde generation of the 1960s, Nádler participated in both IPARTERV exhibitions, the famous R-exhibition, and the Balatonboglár chapel exhibitions. At the end of 1972, Nádler's art underwent another epochal change. The geometric pictorial elements of his series from 1972-75 do not contain any reference to any material motif, their meaning is solely the precise tracing of the movement of a geometric structure.

István Nádler's oeuvre is composed of organically successive, yet clearly separable periods. Certain fundamental elements and problems are constantly present with varying degrees of prominence, while others disappear for a time and then return again. As Lóránd Hegyi writes: 'The decisive structuring role of colour and its "poeticizing" quality [...] runs almost unbroken through' Nádler's work, like the Malevich paralelogram motif, which gradually transforms into a Nikkei figure. As long as the painterly conception or the way of perceiving spatiality and planarity changes cyclically, at other times certain elements (such as the twisted form, the plastic diagonal) appear only in a given period. 

Nádler elaborates the plastic diagonal motif in his series of prints made between 1972 and 1975. He first explores it as a geometric shape that turns from plane to space, dividing the picture surface into planes of different qualities that intersect in space. Then he really takes the form out into space and reappears in sculptures. In paintings after 1977, colours take on a more important image-making role in the representation of the plastic diagonal, which, according to Hegyi, in their capacity as 'colour-objects', organise space around themselves, making it meaningful ('colour-space') and creating new relationships that are determined by the activity of the artist. The red, black, blue and white in the 1980 Composition recall the use of colour by Constructivist artists of the '10s and '20s. Thanks to the diagonal structure, concave homogeneous shapes and the white that fills the lower half of the picture, Nádler creates various imaginary spaces.