Károly Hopp-Halász

• Name — Károly (Hopp-)Halász • Born — 28 January 1946 • Birthplace — Paks, Hungary • Died — 27 November 2016 28 January 1946 • Place of death — Budapest, Hungary • Known for — multimedia art, sculpture, installation art, video art, and performance • Training — Pécs Arts Grammar School

Halász, one of two children of a town official and a housewife, was born in Paks on 28 January 1946. Between 1961 and 1965, he was a student in the department of decorative painting at the Pécs Arts Grammar School. He became familiar with and influenced by the international neo-avant-garde tendencies – especially Op and Pop Art – by attending the lectures of Géza Perneczky, one of the most influential Hungarian art historians of the time. After graduation, Halász started to work at the Bauxite Mine of Pécs as a decorative artist, an experience that was influential in the formation of his own style and served as a common denominator among a group of young artists, gathered around artist and teacher Ferenc Lantos (1929 – 2014).

The Studio of Applied Arts of Pécs was formed by Lantos and a circle of committed former students of the Pécs Arts Grammar School as a platform for collaborative experimentation and (self-)education. The neo-avant-garde artist group Pécs Workshop (Pécsi Műhely) grew out from this studio, co-founded by Halász, Károly Kismányoky (1943–2018), Sándor Pinczehelyi (1946) Ferenc Ficzek (1947 – 1987) and Kálmán Szijártó (1946) in 1968 (formally in 1970). In the early period of the group, neo-constructivist tendencies were dominant, inspired by summer workshops in the enamel factory of Bonyhád between 1969 and 1971, where they created geometric compositions with industrial enamel in collaboration with the factory workers. Halász, under the influence of Bauhaus and Op art, also created numerous geometric paintings (e.g. Color Series, 1970) and enamel works (e.g. Radial Enamel (Red-Blue), 1969, Structures with Pipes, 1970) as well as sculptures (e.g. Cubes, 1972). In 1971, he found the motive of high stand, for him a sort of geometric equivalent of Dürer's magic square in Melencolia I, which led to the High Stand series, his largest geometric-conceptual body of work, that embodied in numerous montages, paintings, and sculptures (e.g. Sculpture I-III, 1978).

From 1971, the focus of the Pécs Workshop, including Halász, shifted towards Conceptual, Pop and Land Art. Halász started a formative European tour in 1972, during which he attended the Documenta 5 at Kassel, a 100-day series of performances and events, directed by Harald Szeeman.

Halász's frequent journeys, the constant experience of transition, and the radically different possibilities and perspectives of art in West- and East-Europe led to the creation of portable and evanescent alternative "museums". These works can be associated with the institutional critique of the documentas section "artist's museums", with works by Marcel Broothaers, Herbert Dristel, Ben Vautier, and Marcel Duchamp, while they also mirrored the conditions of exhibiting progressive art in a socialist country, where modern and neo-avant-garde tendencies were officially rejected and therefore not represented by art institutions. Whatnot Museum (1972) consists of a shelving unit with jam jars, resembling a pantry, with reproductions from Kazimir Malevich's Black Square to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Halász's own works. In the artist's words: "they are thoughts, far-off works, and one's own works out away for use in the future". This future usage of artworks is envisioned in The Museum of the Future (1977), a set of injection ampoules, with which, instead of visiting and contemplating, one can simply injects the experience of artworks from Lynda Benglis, Mario Merz, Marcel Broodthaers, Wolf Vostell, Lucas Samaras and others. This tongue-in-cheek vision resembles the words of the art historian Éva Körner on Hungarian Conceptual art that "the impact of Western art came here as a serum, and everybody used it to satisfy their own burning needs."

Inspired by the writings and the works of László Moholy-Nagy, he started to experiment with photography and lightboxes, which led to the idea of TV object, a geometrical composition of two intersecting cuboids from steel, fixed on a television screen. This served as an arranging filter for television programs like the West Germany-Brazil soccer match in 1973, creating a hyperconstructed/deconstructed experience and chance-compositions, cached by the camera (e.g. Modulated Television II [1972], Modulated Television III [1973]). In Private Transmission (1974) he himself became the program, as he lived and slept in the empty shell of a TV for a day, while he created "Pseudo-videos" (1975) by replacing the TV screen with mirrors set at right angles to each other, which led to geometric self-portraits. Combining and extending Pseudo video and Private Transmission, Halász made a complex half-an-hour video action An Indian in Holland (1978) in Amsterdam Videoheads. According to the documentation of LIMA, "'Indian’ refers to "someone who lives far away from Western society, has no knowledge of technological and electronic developments, and therefore uses the medium more freely". Accordingly, Halász experimented with unusual ways of using television, from painting over his face on the monitor with the help of a closed-circuit set-up to sitting cross-legged inside the empty TV cabinet.

He moved back to his hometown Paks in 1979, and as a public educator, he founded the Paks Visual Experimental Retreat, an annually organized summer camp for artists, in the spirit of the Studio of Applied Arts of Pécs. In 1991, Halász also co-founded and was appointed as the first director of the Paks Pallery based on his neo-avant-garde collection. He received the Mihály Munkácsy Prize, the highest Hungarian state award for outstanding œuvres in fine arts, in 2006. After a long-term illness, he died in Paks on 27 November 2016. From the second half of the eighties, he returned to painting and joined the neo geo movement (Monolith Structures [1987–1988], Neo-Geo-pictures [1989], Picture Plans [1991–2004]). In his Open Geometry series, from 1987, he juxtaposed elements of neo geo stripes and dots with his photographs, mainly depicting body parts of people from ethnic minorities., while some pieces from the Monolith Structures were combined with monochrome columns and mundane objects, such as chairs and baskets.

Solo exhibitions (selected) 1969 – Fiatal Művészek Klubja, Budapest (with Ferenc Ficzek) 1982 – King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár 1984 – Atelier Perneczky, Köln 1992 – Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (with Imre Bukta) 1997 – Geometria Aperta, Galeria Bedoli, Viedana 2010 – Kofferbe pakolt konstruktivizmus, Paksi Képtár, Paks 2016 – Magasles, acb Gallery, Budapest Group exhibitions (selected) 1969 – Pécsi Műhely, Pincegaléria, Pécs 1977 – CAYC International Video Festival, Barcelona 1978 – Hongaarse Konstruktivsche Kunst, 1920–1970, Hertogenbosch–Utrecht–Schiedam 1979 – Works and Words, De Appel, Amsterdam 1980 – Pécsi Műhely 1970–1980, Csók István Gallery, Székesfehérvár; MMK, Paks 1982 – Új-szenzibilitás, Fészek Gallery, Budapest 1985 – Drei Generationen Hungarischer Künstler, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz 1987 – Neue Senzibilitat, Ungarische Künstler der 80er Jahre, Museum der Kunst, Dortmund 1991 – Positionen. Ungarische Kunst der 90er Jahre, Künstlerwerkstatt, München 2009 – Akzent Ungarn, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz 2017 – Parallel Avant-garde. Pécs Workshop 1968–1980, Ludwig Museum, Budapest

(selected) Gallery of Modern Hungarian Art, Pécs Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár Kiscell Museum, Budapest LIMA, Amsterdam Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz