Untitled, 1988
Tamás Konok's paintings confront fundmental questions regarding the space, time and structure of the image in a nonfigurative, formal language. With a decades-long commitment to image composition, Konok is recognised as a pioneer of Hungarian geometric and lyrical abstraction. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Konok begain his career as a figurative artist. Having graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1953, he travelled to Paris in 1958. He would live and work between Paris and Zurich for the next decades. It was in Paris that he was introduced to the possibilities of abstraction through the work of Endre Rozsda and sculptor Lajos Barta, amongst others, with his first solo exhibition at Galerie Lambert, Paris in 1960.
1967-8, however, marks a turning point in his practice; his motifs become more organized, more rectilinear and his organic forms acquire a more geometrical character. From the beginning of the seventies, line-based transparent structures appear in his works, which unfold during the decade into purely abstract compositions. Konok used an array of geometric motifs and painted his compositions in more variations from this time, aiming for the expression of transcendence. For Konok, art was a way of entering another dimension and accessing other realms, be they painterly or otherwise. He would speak about his work in relation to questions of existence, devoting special attention to the coordinated study of line and space, and later sign systems. The last trend in his oeuvre is a powerful series of paintings with stripes of solid colour arranged into pyramidal or other geometric shapes, such as Pyramidale (2017).
1967-8, however, marks a turning point in his practice; his motifs become more organized, more rectilinear and his organic forms acquire a more geometrical character. From the beginning of the seventies, line-based transparent structures appear in his works, which unfold during the decade into purely abstract compositions. Konok used an array of geometric motifs and painted his compositions in more variations from this time, aiming for the expression of transcendence. For Konok, art was a way of entering another dimension and accessing other realms, be they painterly or otherwise. He would speak about his work in relation to questions of existence, devoting special attention to the coordinated study of line and space, and later sign systems. The last trend in his oeuvre is a powerful series of paintings with stripes of solid colour arranged into pyramidal or other geometric shapes, such as Pyramidale (2017).
Konok took his first steps towards nonfigurative art when other twentieth-century artists were dominated by movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art. More akin to principles one might associate with early twentieth-century movements such as De Stijl, his life's work is one of integrity and steadfast commitment to absolute abstraction.
Recognised during his lifetime, in 1964, Konok was given the opportunity to have a solo exhibition at Stedelijk Museum in Rotterdam. Konok had solo exhibitions at numerous important venues in Hungary since the 1980s, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, and he had retrospective exhibitions at the Ludwig Museum, Hungary (1995, 2021) and the Ernst Museum, Hungary (2006). In 2024, three of his paintings were acquired by the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Konok worked and lived in Budapest from the 1990s until his death in 2020.
