Critique

Ervin Ditrói Israeli Daily Newspaper in Hungarian, 1990 There are many varieties of the colour brown. A brown ochre is a lighter, golden dashon a brown surface. The structure will be emphasized by black outlines here and there.When we place a turquoise somewhere, which would not be noticed in another placebut here it is very strong like a lonely brass. The pictures are usually more-figurecompositions but they come into play as a still life in many cases. The figures are notdefined very strictly so the compositions with figures sometimes fade into a still-life.There are figures reminiscent of people that are totally static and there are stirringcompositions where the line itself is stirring. By combining the figures a swirl comes intobeing and at the same time, without our being able to distinguish the figures one by one,it is obvious and clear that it is a crowd of people. They are sitting, moving people orpeople creating ascend. These...

Jean-Christophe Amman Review of the Exhibition Advanced Retrospective Review of the Exhibition Advanced Retrospective In the summer, I read Isaac B.Singer's Shadows on the Hudson. The novel is set in New York immediately after World War II.The people there who fled from Nazi persecution are condemned to fail. But out of that failure, they manage to draw unusual and surprising strength. What is an ordered, straight-lined life compared to one that is characterised by breaks and constant reorientation?Born in 1948, Arp Kovacs spent his youth in Transilvania, Romania.He studied at the art schools in Neumarkt and Klausenburg, was teacher for eleven years, emigrated to Israel in 1985 and has lived in Frankfurt since 1994.The work by Arp Kovacs is characterised by these breaks in his collective biography and the lives of those whom he consciously experiences and articulates as emotional contradiction in his paintings.Arp Kovacs has no homeland and is at home everywhere and nowhere.Condemned to...

Gideon Ofrat Kovacs and Delilah Kovacs calls them “figures” and “human beings”, but we see women _ almost solely women. Heavy black outlines define their round breasts, as do the organic and wave-like stream of curves, which flow and intertwine one figure with the other. With this linear cord, Kovacs binds his women together into one cluster of Eros. One second glance, we note that his inanimate objects – bottles, fruit, flowers – also stem from the erotic world. Kovacs endeavors to fix the erotic firmly in its place, the contour is merely a stage in the painting process which finally ends in turning the woman into a sculpture of stone; interring the living and dynamic in the timeless and eternal stillness. There are suggestions in the work of this painter who studied sculpture (in the course of 14 years of art studies in Romania), of the monumental sculpturesque women of Maillol, Henry Moore and others: the Goddess-Woman. Kovacs’ paintings,...

Viorel Igna Exhibition of Arp Kovacs Romanian Daily Newspaper, Maramaros 1979 Coming back to an old tradition, the Museum of Sziget houses in these days thepaintings and graphics exhibition of Arp Kovacs. The exhibited works reflect ArpKovacs’ periods of affirmation, successively expressed by the plasticity of chromaticrhythms that leads to stylistic unity. The derivation of the artistic space is reflected by thecontrast of shapes, placed alternatively on the canvas. The shapes are treatedorganically whilst the geometry of shapes can be inseminated. The unfinished contourssuggest an interior organization of the artistic expression in which the essence isstressed by a crowd of shapes and by an attentive use of colour patches. An attentivewatch helps to enter the universe of the painting, thus discovering the sense of materialin movement; the dynamic struggle determines the shapes with a tenderness thatcannot be put into words.From the corner of a workroom the artist reveals an imaginary space in which the reflexof light...

Eva Lendvay Surprise in an Exhibition Article from a Romanian Newspaper about the exhibition in 1967 The painter whose pictures people talk about in town (as well as the audience and thecritics) is twenty years old. I got to know this fact only after having visited the exhibition:the pictures show a greater maturity concerning form handling.Arp Kovacs sets off “armed to the teeth” on conquering new ways, the painterly andhuman world; in his pictures we can feel strongly that his intention is to tell peoplesomething, to make an opinion about the world. This intention is the one that has toattain full growth in his works. The two element composition of “Setting off”, theinteresting monochrome of the self-portraits and the original composition of the “Threemothers” – just to mention some examples – tell us about a philosophical depthand struggle. The paintings testify to a great professional expertise and about a well-founded sophistication that helps the artist pick...