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Kazinczy János Antal
1914, Temesvár – 2008, Violés (France)
János Antal Kazinczy was born in Timisoara in 1914. At the age of 18, he became a student of Gyula Rudnay at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 1935, he returned to his homeland, and from 1938, he lived and worked in Sibiu.
His early works depicted Transylvanian landscapes and people, characterized by strong, rigorous lines and subdued, restrained colours. In 1947, his political involvement with the Hungarian People's Alliance forced him to flee to Hungary, where he began teaching at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts in 1949, and also made a living painting landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. Kazinczy was among the first artists to draw inspiration from the Hungarian Revolution, and his works on the subject were featured in numerous exhibitions across Hungary. However, due to the despair surrounding the political and personal circumstances, he left Hungary in 1957. He lived and worked briefly in Austria, then in Germany, and finally, from 1967 until his death, in France.
His art increasingly became defined by Mediterranean natural forms, while gradually becoming more abstract over time. He created meticulously composed panel paintings alongside more spontaneous works on paper, primarily using ink and egg tempera, while also experimenting with fire enamel as a medium. His compositions, now fully non-figurative, initially favored darker shades, but by the 1980s they shifted to vibrant colours on lighter backgrounds. The surfaces come alive with vibrant, playful shapes – organic or geometric – and with lines that range from the straight and precise to the unrestrained and sinuous. The abstract forms reveal fragments of landscapes, layers of earth, small animals, unicellular organisms, aquatic plants, the mysterious blueness of a starry sky, the body and strings of an instrument, or fleeting moments in a city, such as the pulsating contours of a vehicle. From the late 1970s onward, Kazinczy also created painted wood sculptures. For him, the transition from the flat surfaces of paintings to the spatiality of sculpture was a natural progression; these sculptures can be seen as three-dimensional extensions of some of his painted motifs.
In 2024, for the first time in Hungary, INDA Gallery presented a large-scale selection of the artist's works from the 1970s to the 2000s in an exhibition entitled Discoveries.
