Hungarian Cultural Center New York | Magyar Kulturális Intézet York

Entrance Gate of The Life Sciences Institute, University of Debrecen, Hungary, 2005

János Megyik has been investigating the relationship between structures of space in sculpture and architecture, and their planar projection in paintingsince the early 1960s. From his earlier geometric models of imaginary spaces that were constructed of sticks, to his recent metal-sheet pieces, Megyik has worked with the method of perspective and projective geometry.
Interested in how the plane or the screen is defined in geometry as a spatial element, his flat metal pieces – tilted against the wall or framed in glass box containers – transcend their status as images and planes and appear as objects. Drawing on the artistic traditions of Constructivism and Minimalism, Megyik’s work investigates how dualities of spatial and pictorial, image and object, vision and knowledge, have been produced and perceived in Western culture.
Biography János Megyik (b. 1938) emigrated to Vienna in 1956, where he studied painting at the Akademie der bildenden Künste and the Akademie für Angewandte Kunst. In the 1960s, Megyik lived in Vienna and Paris, actively participating in the activities of Magyar Műhely (Hungarian Studio), a Paris-based group of immigrant artists and intellectuals. Besides his architectural metal and wooden constructions, in the 1970s, he also worked as a designer for such companies as Rosenthal Studio-Haus and Amboss.
Megyik’s work has been supported, among others, by the Pollock–Krasner Foundation and the Künstlerhaus des Landeshaupstadt in Munich. He had solo exhibitions in the Museum moderner Kunst in Vienna, and in the Kunsthalle of Hamburg and Budapest. His work is represented in the collection of the Museum moderner Kunst, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Kestner–Museum in Hannover, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, as well as in numerous private collections. In 2006, Megyik was awarded the prestigious Kossuth Prize of the Hungarian Government. He lives and works in Budapest and Kötcse, Hungary.

AN EXHIBITION BY ARTIST JÁNOS MEGYIK