György Z. Gács

Z. Gács György was born in 1914. He studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts between 1935 and 1939, where his teachers were Ágost Benkhard and István Szőnyi. At a young age, he joined the Group of Socialist Visual Artists. At the beginning of his career, he worked in painting and graphic art; in the 1940s he became known for his linocuts, which often carried political and social references. After World War II, he increasingly turned toward art forms connected to architecture. Between 1945 and 1953, he was a teacher and later director of the Secondary School of Fine and Applied Arts. From 1953 until his death, he taught at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts; in 1965 he founded the glass department and, as head of the Silicate Industry Design Department, shaped generations of artists. His pedagogical work fundamentally contributed to the establishment of higher education in glass design in Hungary.

In his art, glass initially appeared as an experimental material, through which he later arrived at kinetic and Op Art–related approaches. He created numerous public and architectural-scale works, many of which have since disappeared or been transformed. His architectural-scale works include: Glass mosaic (1962, Aranyhomok Hotel, Kecskemét); Stained-glass window (1965, Transport Museum, Budapest); Prismatic glass composition (1967, OFOTÉRT, Váci Street and Kecskeméti Street, Budapest); Stained-glass windows (1968, Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest). He died in 1978. His oeuvre remains a defining point of reference in the history of Hungarian and international glass art.