KOCSIS, Imre

KOCSIS, Imre Painter, Graphic Designer (Makó 4th February 1940 - )  1959-1966: College of Fine Arts, Budapest; masters János Kmetty, György Kádár, György Z. Gács. He has been teaching at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest since 1969, and has been head of department since 1991. Between 1977 and 1990 he was the organizer and participant of the Makói Grafikai Művésztelep /Colony of Graphical Artists of Makó/. In 1989 he received the scholarship of the Hungarian Roman Academy of Arts, and was the holder of the Scholarship of the Municipality of Budapest in Lisabon, in 1997. He traveled on study tours to Moscow and Leningrad in 1961, to Paris, Florence, and Venice in 1968, Havanna in 1987, and the United States in 1997. 1985: Munkácsy Award; 1987: Standard Award of the Cultural Ministry of Hungary; 1996: Memorial Plaquette for Hungarian Higher Education; 2002: The Golden Cross of Honor of the Republic of Hungary. Kocsis works in the fields of ceramics, noble photo techniques, and gardening, as well as the popularizing of new graphical techniques. He publishes in the fields of both fine arts techniques and gardening. He has been living in Szentendre since 1969. He began his career around the end of the 1960’s with fine pencil drawings in a baroque style. By the middle of the 1970’s he was considered one of the leading artists of the Hungarian Hyper-Realist Movement, However, in contrast to the American representatives of the style who remained removed and free of emotions within their mode of portrayal, Kocsis, besides painting with photographic precision, did not hesitate to be ironic (e.g.: Előszoba /Hall/, 1972), and does not deny his personal relation to his subjects (e.g.: Külváros /Suburb/, 1978). A series of works was produced during the course of this period, through which the artist became more closely related to the style of Pop Art. Keyholes had an important and unique role in the landscapes of Kocsis’s oeuvre. He painted the majority of these paintings during the beginning of the 1980’s. These works, similar to those he produced from then on, were characterized by a caring illusionist, realist mode of production, however the subjects of his works became more and more subjective, and were based primarily on the experience of being closed in, which he encountered during the course of his childhood years. Kocsis, around 1982, prepared a number of conceptual works at the Colony of Artists in Makó. Gestures, sketches and a personal presence played an important role in these opuses produced with mixed techniques. In his piece entitled Marocco , instead of the well-known sticks of the child’s game with the same name, he made use of pencils, which left marks on the paper. Afterwards he projected onto one another the different concrete stages and accidentally produced marks, thus displaying the occurrence and their outcomes in a simultaneous manner. In his newest creative period Kocsis summarizes the lessons of his life work thus far. The morals of the hyperrealist stages, and conceptual, gesture-like phases of his career appear in complete harmony. In his major work entitled Szivárványkaszás /Rainbow Reaper/ the artist stands with his back towards the viewer with a scythe in his hand (mounted photograph). The scythe makes a long arch shaped mark on the sky above, in the tracks of which a colorful rainbow may be seen, prepared with colored ink. In the bottom third of the work a number amorphous, puddle-like gestures may be found, made with acryl. In the scope of his large-scale works prepared over the past few years he has turned towards a personal natured form of picture production, upholding his painting qualities.

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