Attila Kovacs Hungarian, 1938-2017

(b. 1938 - d. 2017 Budapest, Hungary) Kovács’ vision is deductive and expansive, using the logic of János Bolyai’s geometry as the great Renaissance masters like Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti did with the postulates of Euclid. His art was inspired by Bolyai’s thoughts, which emancipated mathematics from the description of nature, stating mathematics and the mathematics of visual space can also be autonomous.

Between 1964 and 1970 Attila Kovács created a unique artistic language he named “Frame of Reference” or “Transmuting Plasticity”, where he built his own system of non-Euclidean sequential geometric abstraction along mathematical coordinates delineated by the three spatial axes x, y and z, and the time axis t (spacetime) His works are usually two-dimensional, other times they start out in one plane then they build up following the mathematically fixed rhythm of sequential movement and spring into 3D, forming a kind of geometric frieze on the wall. 

Attila Kovács was born in 1938, in Budapest and emigrated to West Germany in 1964. He graduated from the Department of Art at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenen Künste in 1970. Kovács had many international solo and group shows including a retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Budapest in 1995.