Artist István Sándorfi was born in Budapest in 1948, but spent much of his life in Paris. He died in 2007, leaving a fascinating life story and body of work behind him, which is only recently being discovered by a Hungarian audience outside of art specialists.
After his father serving five years in Stalinist prisons during the communist regime, due to his position as director of Hungarian IBM, István Sándorfi’s family was deported to an isolated Hungarian village. At the time of the 1956 uprising, the family fled the country, initially to Germany and finally France. Afflicted by the violence of the revolution, István sought refuge in drawing, and then, at the unusually young age of 12, oil painting. At 17, he held his first solo exhibition at a small gallery in Paris.
Concerned by the morbid nature of his son’s work and fearful of a lack of commercial success, Sándorfi’s father enrolled him at the School of Fine Arts and the School of Decorative Arts. After increasing commercial acceptance, Sándorfi held his first large-scale exhibition in 1973, at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art. Exhibitions then followed in France, Germany, Belgium and finally the US, where he was exhibited exclusively for more than 10 years.
For about 15 years, he painted a series of large-scale, notably aggressive, self-portraits, which led to him acquiring an ambiguous reputation and being described as painting “like an assassin”. He also chose to paint at night, which turned his life into somewhat of a perpetual time lag, disuniting him with a conventional social life. His success increased from 1988 onwards, only when the disturbing nature of his images began to decrease.
19 of Sándorfi’s works will be on display at Budapest’s Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts, but not all will be exhibited at once. “We want appreciation of the canvasses to be optimized, especially if you consider the huge size of several of them”, explained Sándorfi’s daughter, Ange, who now lives in Budapest. The exhibition will span work from 1978-1987, and it’ll be the third time he’s been exhibited in his home country. “He died in December 2007, and was lucky enough to witness the 2006 exhibition that was held in the same gallery. It was an amazing recognition for him, for whom being known in Hungary was the ultimate dream”, Ange explained. The paintings in the exhibition will be for sale.
Opening: February 25th at 9 p.m. Through March 31st
Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts
1055 Budapest, Falk Miksa utca 10.
Tel.: +36.1.374.0774 MAP I. B4
www.kalmanmaklary.com