The latest exhibition of acb Gallery pays tribute to Károly Klimó, an artist of truly exceptional creative energy, who celebrates his 90th birthday this year. On the occasion of this remarkable jubilee, the gallery presents Klimó’s new paintings from recent years, which stand among the most refined and mature works of his oeuvre. The tireless artist’s recent works continue to draw on gesture-driven Informel painting and the principles of collage, while also bearing witness to Klimó’s transcendent sense of color.

Like all of Klimó’s works, these new paintings reveal a restless artistic temperament, channeling even destructive, surface-eroding, and surface-tormenting energies into the act of creation. Even at nearly 90, the artist’s thinking and hand remain in constant motion, persistently and boldly overwriting—sometimes through explicitly script-like gestures—both himself and, in many cases, his earlier works.

Klimó found his distinctive artistic voice in the 1970s, initially manifesting in assemblages and object-collages. By the 1980s, his attention shifted toward the format of panel painting. Lóránd Hegyi, one of the defining art historians of the period, also recognized Klimó’s subjective, personal, and existentially inspired gestural painting, which remains central to his practice to this day. His works are intricately layered, with numerous earlier paintings hidden beneath their surfaces; Klimó often destroys his earlier works on paper to create new constellations and strata from them. His paintings combine a wide range of techniques: traces of egg tempera—perhaps inspired by István Szőnyi—along with gouache, oil, acrylic powder pigment, and, in his most monumental paper works mounted on canvas, even spraying techniques.

In recent years, Klimó’s paintings have continued to be defined by dynamic compositions built on expressive contrasts of light and shadow and opposing poles. His reds resemble fires burning in caves, his yellows evoke the sun, his golds recall the solemnity of iconostases, while his blues suggest vast, cold depths. More recently, a light brown, beige-like tone has increasingly asserted itself within his palette, introducing a sense of lightness that the artist has always sought.

Károly Klimó (b. 1936) graduated in painting from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1962, where he studied first under István Szőnyi and later Aurél Bernáth. His choice of career was significantly influenced by Dr. Róbert Martyn—the adopted son of József Rippl-Rónai—whom he met as a high school student in Kaposvár. Alongside his artistic practice, Klimó is also an outstanding teacher: he began teaching at the Academy in 1971 and served as head of the painting department between 1990 and 2005. In 1980, he participated in the Venice Biennale and was a regular contributor to the New Sensibility exhibitions. His work has been recognized with numerous national and international awards, among which the prestigious Herder Prize (2005) stands out. The Hungarian University of Fine Arts also celebrated Klimó’s 90th birthday with an exhibition at the Barcsay Hall, organized together with his students and colleagues. In recent years, his works have been exhibited at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Budapest, the Gut Gasteil Galerie in Austria, and aqb, while in 2023 he had an exhibition in his hometown at the Munkácsy Mihály Museum in Békéscsaba.