Johanna Kovács

Vita

Johanna Kovács, born in Bucharest on April 5, 1951.

Studies

1972-76: N. Grigorescu Art University, Bucharest, graphic artist,: Vasile Kazár, Ion State; Hungarian University of Related Arts, masters of typography: János Kass, György Haimann.

Art Awards

studio price; Derkovits grant, DCM Art Prize of Vác Art Festival; grant from the city of Salzburg; Graphics level prize of the Bucharest weekly Hét; Art Prize of the Municipality of Érd County; Balaton Art Show; Prize of the Union of Hungarian Artists

Own and group exhibitions, art shows, study trips

after her first own exhibition in Bucharest in 1972 she moves to Hungary to get married. Here and in Europe from Italy to Finland, in the USA and in Israel among others, she presents herself at her own and club shows. On a study trip and with exhibitions, she comes among others to Austria, France, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, Italy and Poland.

Keys to your art

Johanna is the daughter of Schriftstellet parents. This forms at least two pillars of her art, one of figurative illustrator, other of cultivating the minority culture, and serving by promoting it. In her art pieces she conveys the report of other arts and social situations with graphic means. Acquisition of illustrator mastery was recognized with diploma from Bucharest N. Grigorescu University, Faculty of Graphic Art in 1976. Their masters were the world-renowned expressive graphic artist V. Kazar and the intellectual I. State. She moved to Budapest in 1977, where she received her second diploma at the book artist course as a student of György Haimann book artist and János Kass. Johanna’s diploma thesis in Bucharest was the lithograph series on the tragedy of man by Imre Madách. She illustrated the calendar cycle by Domokos Szilágyi and designed the book as a thesis in Budapest.

Johanna is a member of the Association of Hungarian Artists and Graphic Designers, the Association of Hungarian Illustrators and the Artists’ Colony of Érd. She is primarily known in the professional literature on creating graphics and paintings, but she also works on applied graphics. In her work she is interested in the depiction of human relationships. She works mainly with ink, pen and watercolor. Compositions of spontaneous effect, sketches and bone-like signs characterize her works. Their figures are frame-like, often torsos. Her compositions became simpler from the mid-80s. After her stay in Israel in 1988, her works became more colourful, despite the painterly effects, the graphic element dominated in works from this period. Her paintings are also more graphic, more painterly in the details. From the early 90’s, her world of colors became darker.

What has not changed is not related to the current exhibition, the analysis of the human, of social connections motivates the solution of basic artificial questions. The first experience of the exhibited works is breaking out of their space. This is related to the plastic heads of János Kass, which he places in a clothed cardboard labyrinth cast in plexi and polystyrene. How Johanna breaks out of the press on the plain with her paper relief built on canvas is more to do with Schwitters’ Merz works. Not, as Alfred Barr referred to, as an inexplicable dream, but more as a rescue of her figurative works into the abstract. Johanna does not lose her figuration even in these fresh works, she keeps that with abstraction over epigenetic sensitivity we get her say, to the tension between the figures, to the historical schizophrenia. She creates her figurative compositions with sculpture technique. To do this, she selects the appropriate cellulose, mixes the fillers, binders and colorants she has experimented with over the years, brings the paper mache onto canvas and paints her composition with acrylic paint and a painting knife, she draws her compositions with ink and graphite. The monumentality and the harmony of the works can be compared to the attention-grabbing triangle of the grand symphonic crescendo, achieved through the placement of colored dots in bright paper compositions.