László Lakner

László Lakner, as a member of the Iparterv Group, is one of the central figures of the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde. His name has been long identified with the emergence of the pop aesthetic in the Hungarian art scene. However, the early Lakner paintings' themes did not focus on the popular topics typical of American art but rather on pressing, local socio-political issues.

Lakner has worked in an astonishing variety of genres. Simultaneously, with his painting practice, he created conceptual works, objects, sculptures, photography, book illustrations, posters and experimental films. His paintings of the 1970s reveal a documentarian attitude: he was interested in the somewhat alienated depiction of enlarged postcards, identity cards and film stills, which he painted based on photographs.

One can recognise the dual theme in his early work that later became important to him: the genre of painting and the book, be it poetry or philosophy, the symbiosis of the sensually painted Informel surface and the letter. The emotional charge of the two, the intellectual tension that contradicts all foundations, is the crucial artistic problem in the Lakner paintings of the 1980s and the 1990s.

Apart from issues concerning form, Lakner's oeuvre created in Germany revolves around a fundamental philosophical problem: the identity of art. Like people who live in two cultures, Lakner constantly formulates questions about painting, concerning the role models, he chooses and, last but not least, his own identity.

 

Katalin Néray