Abstract Glass's in Sunlight

Abstract oil on board, two glass on a shelf in sunlight.

39.5" (100cm) by 27.5" (70cm)

GÉZA OGONOVSZKY

Budapest 1922 – Brussels 1989.

Géza Ogonovszky belongs to that fascinating generation of European artists whose lives and careers were completely reshaped by the Second World War and its aftermath.

Born in Budapest in 1922, he began his artistic training at the School of Industrial Drawing before entering the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1944, where he studied under the celebrated Hungarian painter István Szőnyi.

Remarkably, Ogonovszky was already exhibiting in Budapest during the early 1940s. He showed at the National Salon in 1946 and 1947 and held a solo exhibition at the Művész Gallery in 1948.

That same year, his life changed dramatically.

Ogonovszky left Hungary and settled in Belgium. Belgian parliamentary records later describe him as holding official refugee status under the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. He made Belgium his permanent home, eventually becoming a naturalised Belgian citizen.

From there he built a genuinely international career.

Ogonovszky exhibited throughout Belgium and also in the Netherlands, France, Italy and the United States. His work received a silver medal at the Grand Prix d’Été in Nice in 1971 and a distinction at the Grand Prix in New York in the same year.

His paintings range from figurative and religious subjects to increasingly expressive and abstract compositions. The Belgian Dictionary of Painters describes an artist working with a rich, heavily worked paint surface, strong colour and a vigorous style closely related to Expressionism.

There is a physicality to his paintings which is particularly apparent when they are seen in person. Colour is built up, scraped, layered and worked across the surface rather than simply used to describe what is in front of him.

By 1977 Ogonovszky had established a permanent gallery in Ostend devoted to exhibiting his own work.

His connection with Hungary was never entirely lost. He exhibited at Budapest’s Műcsarnok in 1982 and at the Hungarian National Gallery in 1986. His work is now represented in the permanent collection of the Hungarian National Gallery.

Ogonovszky died in Brussels in 1989.

Today his paintings sit rather intriguingly between two histories: the Hungarian modernist tradition in which he was trained and the post-war Belgian Expressionist world in which he spent the majority of his working life.