Gábor Attalai (1934-2011)

Visual artist, textile designer. From the 1960s onwards, Gábor Attalai became an important figure of the “underground” art scene and of the “official” applied art scene in Hungary. He completed his studies at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts in 1958, and in addition to his applied art work as a textile designer for the Iparművészeti Vállalat [Applied Arts Company], he regularly visited the Zugló Circle, and became close friends with Tibor Csiky and Imre Bak. His felt sculptures and spatial textiles, in which folk art references often appeared, are comparable to Robert Morris’s works, and also can be linked to the international tendencies of minimal art. His work as an art writer and art organizer is also significant, e.g. he did not take part in the I. IPARTERV exhibition in 1968, because he was busy organizing the exhibition titled Textil falikép 68 (Ernst Museum, Budapest, 1968), which can be considered the antecedent of the Fal- és Tértextil Biennále in Szombathely. In addition, he joined international art networks in the late 1960s and began mail correspondence. He had connections with Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Christo, Gilbert and George, Donald Judd, and Harald Szeemann, among others. From the second half of the 1960s, his conceptual practice became more and more important, he carried out actions, objects, graphics, and photographic works, sometimes saturated with political references (e.g. Negative Star, 1970–71). He began his Red-y made series created with found objects, reproductions, and employing the colour red around 1972, based on Malevich’s monochrome paintings and Duchamp’s ready-mades. From the 1980s onwards, he gradually withdrew from the public, and his oeuvre, which can be linked to body art, land art, mail art and project art, is getting rediscovered recently, resulting his works getting acquisitioned by such significant collections as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hungarian National Gallery and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among others.