Károly Hopp-Halász
About the artist
Károly Hopp-Halász began his career in the late 1960s as a member of the Pécs Workshop, formed by a group of Ferenc Lantos’s students, who combined the traditions and contemporary forms of geometric art with the tendencies of land art. Hopp-Halász studied and worked in Pécs, then, in the late 1970s, moved back to his parents’ home in Paks. In 1979, he initiated the Experimental Visual Art Camp of Paks and, in the beginning of the nineties, he founded Art Gallery Paks. The traditions and new methods of constructivism have equally left their mark on a career diverse in both media and subject matter, where, alongside painting, the dominating medium, photography, photo-action and performance, graphic art, object art and installation also feature prominently. As Márta Kovalovszky put it, “[H]is desire to reach a classic picturesque expression through simple geometry”, to pass geometric thinking through a personal filter, signified a cornerstone in Hopp-Halász’s path as an artist, leading him to create a private mythology of recurring motifs and themes.
