Visiting period: 23rd of July – 27th of September 2024

Curators: Beáta Bordás PhD, Szilárd Miklós PhD

Opening: The exhibition was opened on 23rd of July 2024 from 3 pm, by Sándor Tamás, president of the Covasna County Council, Zsolt Németh, president of the Hungarian Foreign Affairs Council, art historian dr. Ferenc Loránd Deák and dr. Beáta Bordás, coordinator of the Transylvanian Art Centre.

The exhibition presents 90 paintings from the rich oeuvre of János Dés Incze, covering the various creative periods of the artist. This is how, for example, portraits, urban landscapes and portraits taken in the 1940s are juxtaposed; the memories of his travels in Italy and Transylvania (from the sixties and seventies) or his works painted in his latest period, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The exhibition with an original layout outlines the themes to which the painter returned throughout his life: the church and the main square from Dej, the details of the city of Dej, winter scenes, buffaloes, urban landscapes captured during travels, small town characters, intimate moments from family life, self-portraits. Among the works on loan from eight private collections, the painter's family and the collections of the Sapientia Foundation and the Haáz Rező Museum in Odorheiu Secuiesc, there are many works that have not been seen by the public for a long time, so this retrospective exhibition offers a unique opportunity to have a clear overview of his defining works. The exhibited artworks were selected by Beáta Bordás, the layout of the exhibition was conceived by Szilárd Miklós.
The exhibition is accompanied by a trilingual catalogue with a foreword by Ferenc Loránd Deák.

János Dés INCZE (Seini, 1909 – Dej, 1999)

He graduated from the lower secondary school in Satu Mare in 1924; during his student years he became interested in painting, so he regularly visited the studios of his form teacher, Sándor Sarkadi, and that of Aurél Popp. After school, he worked as a gardener and then as a merchant apprentice, and in 1926 he became an hourly wage worker in the painting workshop of the Iris porcelain factory in Cluj, where he worked with Ferenc Gáll (François Gall). In the little free time he had, he was an extracurricular student at the School of Fine Arts in Cluj between 1928 and 1929. Between 1929 and 1934 (with a two-year break due to military service) he completed teacher training at the Bethlen Gábor College in Aiud, then he was assigned as a primary school teacher in Zalău, and in 1935 settled permanently in Dej, where he lived for the rest of his life.

His chosen city, Dej, with its main square dominated by the medieval church and narrow winding streets, its market, the banks of the Someș and its small-town milieu, provided the painter with a constant source of subject matter and inspiration. He was so attached to the town that in the 1940s he took its name as a first name. He captured the people and spaces of the small town in paintings pervaded by a serene irony; he was interested in the reality of everyday life. He depicted the deliberately distorted, sketchily painted figures with expressive, characteristic movements and gestures; his paintings that have a fairy-tale effect impress with the vividness of a snapshot. His non-central compositional method breaks the classical rules (he does not follow the traditional order of foreground, middle ground and background); the painter assigns equal importance to the different elements of the subject. In addition to the townscapes and genre images of Dej, his canvases also reflect the buildings of Sighișoara and Cluj, as well as details of the towns and landscapes he discovered during his study trips in Italy.

Solo exhibitions:
1930: Casino, Aiud • 1942: the gym of the girls’ school in Dej • 1947: the auditorium of the Bolyai University, Cluj • 1948: Palace of Culture, Târgu Mureș • 1960: Palace of Culture, Cluj • 1962: Regional Museum, Baia Mare (together with Sándor Benczédi and Ileana Vremir); Museum, Oradea • 1963: Gallery of the Romanian Artists’ Association, Târgu Mureș • 1970: Sándor Petőfi House of Culture, Bucharest; Historical Museum, Satu Mare • 1971: Museum, Sfântu Gheorghe; House of Culture, Miercurea Ciuc; Small Gallery of the Art Fund, Târgu Mureș • 1972: Dej • 1974: Gallery of the Art Fund, Cluj • 1975: Korunk Gallery, Cluj-Napoca; Small Gallery, Satu Mare (together with Ilona Benczédi) • 1976: Small Gallery, Cluj-Napoca • 1978: Small Gallery, Satu Mare • 1979: House of Culture, Dej • 1981: Gallery of the Art Fund, Cluj-Napoca • 1982: the shop of the Art Fund, Târgu Mureș • 1989: the exhibition hall of the National Széchényi Library, Budapest

Commemorative exhibitions:
2003: retrospective exhibition, Transylvanian House, Sopron • 2009: anniversary exhibition, Friendship Cultural Centre, Százhalombatta • 2010: Duna Gallery, Budapest • 2011: Minerva House, Cluj-Napoca (together with László Vajda) • 2018: The Beheading of the Dragon (together with Ana Botezatu), Quadro Gallery, Cluj-Napoca • 2022: Téka Foundation, Gherla

Award: 1989: János Kájoni Art Prize

Organizers: Sfântu Gheorghe City Hall, Transylvanian Art Centre Association
Sponsors: Hungarian Government – State Secretary for National Policy, Bethlen Gábor Fund