János Mattis Teutsch and the Hungarian Avant-garde

Louis Stern Fine Arts, in collaboration with Mission Art Galéria, Budapest, is pleased to present János Mattis Teutsch and the Hungarian Avant-garde, a landmark exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture.  The exhibition opens with a reception from 6 to 9 PM April 20 and continues through July 20 2002.

While LACMA ‘s current exhibition, Central European Avant-gardes:  Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930, canvasses a wide ranging assortment of artists and art movements in Eastern Europe, János Mattis Teutsch and the Hungarian Avant-garde focuses on a small, relatively unknown yet visionary group of Hungarian artists.  These artists, struggling against an extraordinarily complex political backdrop, used their art to challenge the entire notion of visual truth.  Forgoing description, using color as expression and composition as a tool to evoke thought, their work repositioned the artist as integral to the evolution of the society as a whole.  

With retrospective exhibitions at the Hungarian National Gallery and Haus der Kunst in Munich, János Mattis Teutsch emerges as perhaps the most rediscovered artist of this generation.  His paintings, drawings, linocuts and wood sculptures were some of the first of these works to be exhibited at the gallery Der Sturm , as well as the first to be showcased in the extremely influential art publication, MA (Today).  During his first painting exhibition, critics reflected on his dreamily colored landscapes, seemingly peopled by interwoven figures, as the “direct expression of inner states of feeling through absolute painterly means.”

In addition to Mattis Teutsch, this exhibition features selected works by Róbert Berény, Sándor Bortnyik, Béla Kádár, Judit Kárász, Lajos Kassák,, László Moholy Nagy, Farkas Molnár, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, János Schádl, Hugó Scheiber, Lajos Tihanyi, Béla Uitz and Lajos Vajda.  In featuring these artists’ work, the gallery honors the unsung heroes of a revolutionary reinvention of the relationship between art and daily life; a revolution of thought that created a revolution of beauty.