User:Iski Kocsis Tibor/sandbox

Attila Kovacs (15 December 1938, Budapest - 6 April 2017, Budapest) was a Hungarian artist.

Biography
Attila Kovács was born in 1938, in Budapest. He imigrated to West Germany in 1964. He graduated from the Department of Art at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenen Künste in 1970. He moved to Cologne in 1972 where he lived and worked until 2010. From 1984, he regularly returned to Hungary as German citizen and had a retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Budapest in 1995. He was a senior lecturer of the Painting Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts between 1997 and 2010. In 2001, he became a Doctor of Liberal Arts. After closing down his studio in Cologne in 2010 he moved back to Budapest, where he lives with his wife and their two young children.

Work
The oeuvre of Attila Kovács is characterized by accountability, in other words, he inspects the things around us in phases, and he builds his simultaneously singular and complex world from constituents that can be interpreted both separately and collectively. "Whatever we are thinking about, or whatever we are looking at, there can be two different ways to get in contact with anybody or anything: CONTINUOUSLY or INTERMITTENTLY. Therefore, it is recommended to examine each existent thing that is distinct from everything else in its singularity and in its complexity, as well. However, the periodicity is directly related to something which artists do not simply dislike, but actually despise: namely, QUANTITY and its linguistic name, the NUMBER."

Following the Trecento, Western Art became fascinated by mimesis. The mapping of the surrounding world was built on continuous observation. It worked towards a more authentic visual representation, relying on an increasingly more accurate perception all the way until the 19th- 20th century. Paul Cézanne was seeking the method of simplifying visual imaging, thus having formed the basis for Piet Mondrian’s analysis of geometric reduction. Kovács broke with the Euclidean mimetic art in the mid 1960s and established a new paradigm in fine arts: namely, the visual definition of qualified countable units. Kovács’ vision is deductive and expansive, using the logic of János Bolyai’s geometry as the great Renaissance masters like Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti did with the postulates of Euclid. His art was inspired by Bolyai’s thoughts, which emancipated mathematics from the description of nature, saying mathematics and the mathematics of visual space can also be autonomous. In 1964, Kovács invented the concepts of time-axis and structural scheme, replacing the perspective in order to create a painting oeuvre based on a non-Euclidean geometry. Since then, he has been working with numerical sequences.

"A new, different world, this was the question also for the young Hungarian artist when here, in Zirndorf (in the migration camp in West Germany), from scratch, he drew on paper a world never before seen in art history." said Thomas Heyden, based on the studies of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Between 1964 and 1970 Attila Kovács created a unique artistic language he named “Frame of Reference” or “Transmuting Plasticity”, where he built his own system of non-Euclidean sequential geometric abstraction along mathematical coordinates delineated by the three spatial axes x, y and z, and the time axis t (spacetime). The artist defined these infinitely variable series in the “Function Table of Relativisation and Synthetisation of Visual Structures” (1973-1976). The concept of synthetic programming was born. Kovács draws the structural analysis and synthesis of the square and the circle along algorithms (Fig. _ synthese, kreis). He selects sequences of his Transformations (Fig. _ 1 transformation von transmutation 3) and designs them on canvas mounted on wooden board, or on paper, thus the “Progressive-Regressive Squares in 3 positions” (Fig. _, _ koordination p3 series) and the “Meta Squares” (meta-quadrat, shaped canvases) are made.

The sequences of his p3 series are invited to the documenta 6 in Kassel. His study titled ‘The Transmutation Principle – The Theory of Transformations’ is published in the catalogue. An excerpt of the study will explain Kovács’ theory on the relation of structure and form, namely, that structure is entirely different from form: s ≠ f. The structure can be relativized, the structure is the language itself. Let us call the structure simply net, which the artist, following his intuition, synthesizes to a square, to a rectangle. The forms appearing in the net are various sequences of his transformation chosen with the help of the artist’s intuition. His program book of several hundred pages created between 1967 and 1973 includes his algorithmic sequences of his transformations built on arithmetic, linear algebra and parameters. Based on these mathematical sequences, the visual mapping of his open structure with the form inside it can be theoretically reconstructed or continued. Further, the synthesis of structure and form defined in his program book can be produced and printed on paper with the help of a computer.

Starting in 1984, he draws up his first meta-lines placing them into a changing structure, therefore the lines 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 depend on the position of that changing structure (Fig. _ Frame of Reference A4-B8- 1973-76, Plus three metalines in position dependence). His works are usually two-dimensional. Other times they start out in one plane then they build up following the mathematically fixed rhythm of sequential movement and spring into 3D, forming a kind of geometric frieze on the wall. His works on wooden board and paper have a striking factor, nothing compares to his unique and outstanding manual craftsmanship. Each and every panel painting of the artist is a custom-made, unique painting executed on a panel with approximately 40 layers of foundation. Kovács’ paintings are rare examples of human focus. He uses the paint as a living material. Guided and applied by his entire knowledge, the paint purposely becomes an ingredient to the material of the picture, thereby creating a ‘visual truth’, a ‘visual quality’.

"What we see is made of invisible elements, what we think does not consist of thoughts, but is a result of grammatical synthesis. Every linguistic relationship is sensual in terms of the ‘means of transportation’, however, its rules are not sensual, but structural instead. The parameters defining the visual form, namely the information structure of the painting cannot be seen, but a form arising from some informational structure becomes visible. The information shapes the material into formation, into form."