Visiting period: 19th of April – 6th of July 2024 (at the Transylvanian Art Centre)
18th of August – 8th of September 2024 (at the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca)

Curators: Beáta Bordás PhD and Ágota Portik Blénessy PhD

Opening: The exhibition at the Transylvanian Art Centre was opened on 19th of April 2024 from 6 p.m., by Zoltán Banner art historian and Beáta Bordás, coordinator of the Transylvanian Art Centre.

The exhibition organized at the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca during the The Hungarian Cultural Days of Cluj was opened on the 18th of August 2024, by Lucian Nastasă-Kovács, manager of the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca and the curators of the exhibition, art historians Beáta Bordás and Ágota Portik Blénessy.

The present exhibition at the Transylvanian Art Centre is the first to present to the Transylvanian public these two outstanding, closed oeuvres, in more than a hundred works of art by an iconic couple of artists from the 1960’s and 1970’s in Cluj. In this exhibition we aimed to present both oeuvres as fully as possible, showing their phases and presenting the main works of the two artists in relation to each period of creation. At the same time, we have also sought to create a dialogue between the works of the two artists. We hope that this retrospective exhibition and the album, which goes beyond the usual framework of our previous exhibition catalogues and includes forewords by three authors – Zoltán Banner, dr. Ádám Kovács and Beáta Bordás PhD – will be a worthy way of preserving and putting on the agenda the work of these two artists.

Ilona T. SZŰCS (Mediaș, 1930 –Munich, 1990)

She studied at the Târgu Mureș Vocational School of Arts under András Bordi and István Barabás. In 1951, she began her studies in painting at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest.From 1952 to 1957 she attended the Ion Andreescu Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj, where she worked under the tutelage of Gábor Miklóssy, Béla Abodi Nagy and Teodor Harșia. In 1955, she got married to her classmate, László Tóth from Satu Mare, their son Tamás was born in 1960.
From 1959 onwards she became a regular participant in the annual provincial and later countyart exhibitions in Cluj-Napoca. In 1965, she received a joint studio with her husband László Tóth and graphic artist Gusztáv Cseh in the Donát district (Vlahuță Street studios), where she also held preparation courses for college admission.
Her works were included in the exhibitions of Romanian artists in Titograd (1968) and Turin (1969). In 1971-72, together with her husband, she created the largescale glass mosaic in the staircase of the Cluj Radio Studio. In 1975 she presented 18 paintings in a solo exhibition at the Korunk Gallery in Cluj-Napoca, while her second solo exhibition (together with her husband) was held posthumously in Szentendre. In 1974 she participated with her husband in the Győr International Artists’ Colony, and in 1981 in the Friendship Creative Art Camp in Lăzarea.

From the 1970s until the early 1980s she worked as a costume designer at the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj-Napoca, her most important works being in the plays Dumitru Radu Popescu: The Dwarf in the Summer Garden (1974), László Csiki: Old House (1978), László Lőrinczi: The Lover (1982), Sándor Tomcsa: Surgery (1983), Ernő Szép: The Bridegroom (1983). In 1984, Ilona T. Szűcs settled in Munich with her husband, where she worked mainly in decorative art before her early death.

In the 1960s she painted numerous cityscapes of Cluj, consisting of meticulously composed geometric forms. She also made a few portraits, but her interest lay primarily in still lifes assembled from odd, random objects found in and around her studio, which run throughout her oeuvre. These intimate, sometimes depressive, metaphorical still lifes draw on the tools of surrealism and metaphysical painting.

Solo exhibitions:
1975: Korunk Gallery, Cluj Napoca • 1991: Aktív Art Gallery, Szentendre (posthumous, jointly with her husband László Tóth)

Award:
1979: „Cântarea României” [Song to Romania] Festival, second edition, 3rd prize in costume design category

László TÓTH (Satu Mare, 1933 – Wertingen, 2009)

Between 1951 and 1957, he was a student at the painting department of the Ion Andreescu Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj, where his teachers were: Tibor Kádár, Teodor Harșia, Béla Abodi Nagy, and then Gábor Miklóssy. During his university studies, in 1955, he married his classmate, Ilona Szűcs.

After graduation, he began his career as a regular external contributor to the Utunk journal, creating illustrations for short stories and reports published in the magazine between 1957 and 1983. Duringthis period, several other magazines (Korunk, Napsugár, Igaz Szó, etc.) published his drawings, while healso illustrated books and designed book covers. He was a high school teacher for a short time. In the mid-sixties, he got a joint studio with Ilona T. Szűcs and Gusztáv Cseh in the Donát district of Cluj, wherehe and his wife also held preparatory courses for admission to college.

Between 1965 and 1971, he was a set designer of the Hungarian State Theater in Cluj, and later also designed many important sets as an external designer. In the period between 1965 and 1983, he created the set designs for around 25 plays, including A. Miller: After the Fall, Ion Băieșu: Forgiveness, Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale, I. Madách: The Tragedy of Man, D. R. Popescu: The Garden Dwarf, András Sütő: Star on a Pyre and László Csiki: Old House.In 1971, he became an assistant professor, and later an associate professor, in the department of monumental painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca, teaching drawing, painting, composition and various painting techniques. In 1983, he was appointed head of department, but in 1984 he emigrated to Munich with his wife. From 1986, he became a set painter at the Munich Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz. After 1992, he began to actively create again and worked as a freelance visual artist until his death in 2009.

Between 1959 and 1983, he exhibited almost every year at the regional and county exhibitions in Cluj, as well as at state exhibitions in Bucharest. A joint exhibition dedicated to the memory of his wife can be considered his first solo show (Szentendre, 1991). Since the end of the 1990s, he participated in some group exhibitions in Germany.

His visionary graphic works and paintings are characterized by a way of seeing close to surrealism, and he brought innovation to Hungarian fine art in Transylvania through the use of collage techniques and new materials. In addition to genre paintings about Cluj, in the 1970s his subjects were his mother, his wife and himself, while he also painted “exploded” still lifes. One of the important themes of his oeuvre is the Negotiation series.

Solo exhibitions:
1991: Aktív Art Gallery, Szentendre (together with his wife, Ilona T. Szűcs) • 2002: Galerie Schröder, Augsburg; “Bálint” Jewish Community House, Budapest • 2003: Korunk Gallery, Cluj-Napoca • 2004: Puskin Community Centre, Tatabánya

Memorial exhibitions:
2014, 2018: Quadro Gallery, Cluj-Napoca

Awards:
1968: First Degree of the Cultural Merit Medal; National Prize of the Association of Fine Artists in the category of set design • 1969: National Theatre Competition, Bucharest, first prize • 1979: „Cântarea României” [Song to Romania] Festival, second edition, Bucharest, stage design category, 3rd prize

Organisers: Town Hall of Sfântu Gheorghe, Transylvanian Art Centre Association – at Cluj-Napoca: Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca, Kincses Kolozsvár Association

Sponsors: Hungarian Government – State Secretary for National Policy, Bethlen Gábor Fund, BitWise IHS Kft.