Index – Culture – Artist Tamás Konok passes away

The artist passed away at dawn on Friday in the 91st year of his life. Tamás Konok, a Kossuth Prize-winning painter and sculptor named artist of the nation, is considered dead by the Human Resources Ministry, the ministry’s press and communication department told MTI.

Tamás Konok was born in 1930 in Budapest. As a child he was a musician and learned to play the violin at the Superior Conservatory of Music between 1945 and 1950, but soon he devoted himself to drawing and painting in a family way (his grandfather, Gyula Sándy, was a professor at the Technical University).

He graduated from the Hungarian Higher School of Fine Arts in 1953 as a student of Aurél Bernáth.

However, music accompanied him throughout his career. His first paintings were study interiors with figures, portraits made from a model. The change in his vision was fundamentally determined by his six-month fellowship to Paris in 1958. He was still back from France at the time, but settled in Paris in 1959 and lived there until the change of regime.

Since 1953 he has exhibited almost every year in Hungary and throughout Europe. His first solo exhibition was directed in 1960 by Galerie Lambert in Paris. From 1963, he worked in New York and California for a year on a grant from the Hartford Foundation. Between 1963 and 1974 he appeared regularly in the exhibitions of the Réalités nouvelles, in 1970 he obtained French citizenship, but also retained Hungarian citizenship.

From 1971 he came into close contact with the Schlégl Gallery in Zurich for 25 years. He exhibited with his wife, the sculptor Katalin Hetey, in 1981 -with great prominence- at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Since 1992 he was an honorary professor at the Technical University.

His works are in many large public collections. Among others, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur, the Musée des beaux-arts in Bern, the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Neuchatel, Brussels, the European Parliament, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris , the Städtische Sammlung in Hamburg, the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam-Rotterdam, the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art – Ludwig Museum, as well as in many private national and foreign collections.

Tamás Konok has been an honorary member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Art since 2001, and a full member since 2006.

The artist received the title of Knight of the National Order of Merit of the French Republic in 1997. For his career he was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1988, the Artist of the Nation in 2014 and the Prima Primissima Prize.