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KONKOLY, Gyula Fine Artist (Budapest 21st June 1941 - ) 1956-1964: College of Fine Arts of Budapest, master: Gyula Hincz; 1971: (collective) Grand Award of the B. de Paris; 1992: Munkácsy Award. Between 1964 and 1965 he traveled to Vienna, Italy, and France on study tours. In 1970, following a short stay in Italy he emigrated to France. During this time he was sentenced, at home in Hungary, to two and a half years of suspended prison sentencing and the confiscation of his property. Between 1990 and 1991 he worked in Sweden. In 1991 he returned to Hungary. Between 1992 and 1995 he was department leading teacher of the Master's School of the Janus Pannonius Science University of Pécs. Konkoly was one of the founders of the Neo-Avant-Garde movement, which developed in Hungary around the middle of the 1960's, as well as being an exhibiting artist of the Iparterv-Group. During his college years he joined the Surreal-Natural group of Tibor Csernus, László Lakner, and Ákos Szabó. With the set of tools and techniques developed by them (object crowdedness, re-scraped and smacked surfaces) he painted a number of paintings with personal topics (e.g.: Vacsora a szabadban /Dinner in the Open/; A Múzsa jelenléte a Magyar Képzõmûvészeti Fõiskolán /The presence of the Muse at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts/; A Gyógyfürdõ parkja /The Park of the Health Bath/, 1962-64). In knowledge of the large American Pop-art exhibition, seen in Vienna, and the materials of the Galerie Sonnabend of Paris he began joining press-photo motifs and quotes from classical art (such as: George de la Tour, Tiziano, Rembrant and Goya), with poured, sprinkled, and hard-edge surfaces, and applied textiles (e.g.: Ugar-ragu /Fallow Ragu/, 1965; Dózsa, 1966; Danaé és Maya /Danaé and Maya/, 1966; Szt. József a gyermek Jézussal /Saint Joseph with the child Jesus/, 1967). His shocking, grotesque, stridently colored objects, prepared with synthetic resin, were the most radical pieces of Hungarian Pop-Art (Fõiskolai tanulmány /College Study/; Lágyított tojás /Softened Egg/; Egy rózsaszál szebben beszél /A rose speaks nicer/, 1968). This radicalism was what lead him to the preparation of environmental, conceptual works. Sections of the memorial series were so-called onánia-models, which made use of the simplistic rules and regularities of physics and chemistry, composed of ice and glass pistons, while the emblematic work of the 2nd Iparterv Exhibition opened on the 24th of October, 1969, a man-sized block of ice, wrapped in cotton wool and gauze, bleeding potassium permanganate. The central piece of the environmental action series entitled Ünnepi hét /Celebration Week/, held in Leninváros, between the period spanning from Christmas to New Years Eve, entitled Itt jelentkezzen öt egyforma ember! /Five identical people, please report here/, was a fine example of the political Neo-Avant-Garde of the period. The exhibition held at the Adolf Fényes Studio in February of 1970, with its pillory system, element of exposed water, closed in infinite, and the "exhibited viewer", squeezed into the window of the exhibition, constituted a conceptual, political environment. The exhibition at Adolf Fényes Studio was his first independent conceptual exhibition in Hungary. With its notional language and the aesthetics of its usage of material, it played a significant role in the formulation of conceptual art in Hungary. As the editor and publisher of the publication entitled Dokumentum 69-70 (Document 69-70), on the day following the publishing of the piece, Konkoly felt it was best to leave the country. He formulated the M. K. P. Memorial with the help of the artists of G. Attico in Rome. At the Biennial of Paris, held in 1971 he exhibited his Illegal Structure of the Party, laid upon segments of Lenin the written out in words, with a accordantly utilizable, manipulated system of networks, and a praxis-ready telephone booth. His last conceptual exhibition was held at the Cité des Arts, in 1972, on the illusion producing capabilities of art, with which the nonexistent may be portrayed as an existing element. Around the end of the year of 1972 he published a manifesto on the death of Neo-Avant-Garde. From 1973 he worked primarily as an illustrator; the number of book covers produced by him was approximately one-hundred (he worked for publishers such as the Gallimard, the Hachette, the Robert Laffont, the J'ai lu, and the Albin Michel publishing houses). Simultaneously he prepared a number of plaquettes for companies such as M. G. M., Warner Brs., Columbia, Walt-Disney, Gaumont, U. G. C., etc. He returned to fine arts during the middle of the 1980's. He prepared painted and plastically formed large-scale installation pieces, conjoining Infromel, Pop-Art, Photo-Realism, and Geometry. Konkoly prepared spectacular, seemingly moving works, which stood out with lively painting style, sharp lights, disputatious colors, and the proactive stressing of the inner organs and the motif of excrement (e.g.: Dávid és Betsabé /David and Betsabe/, 1988; Ilza, a gulág tigrise /Ilza, the Tiger of the Gulag/, 1987; Visconti és az Adó garas /Visconti and the Tax Halfpenny, 1988). In his series inspired by Monet's water lilies, picturesqueness flows spontaneously, within the inseparable conjoining of water, light, reflection and color, illusion and reality (Susanne Claude Monet-nál Givernyben, /Susanne at the residence of Claude Monet in Giverny/ 1990-92). The idea of the illusionary, ephemeral property of art, which Konkoly was deeply interested in earlier on in his career, was realized within the installation exhibition held at the Church Museum of Kiscelli, within the necropolis of melting ice sculptures, memorial formed from plastic. At the 100th Anniversary of the foundation of the art camp of Nagybánya, he made the picture defining of the spectacle and illusion world of plein air painting the central theme of his presentation. Konkoly has been painting classical figural paintings for the past few years.