Miklós Németh can be apostrophized in many ways: he was a self-righteous and passionate painter, from whose hands the works instinctively “flowed” with the freshness of spontaneity. He was a benevolent clown figure who could laugh with great wisdom at his own destiny and the hardships of life, and subordinated everything to his obsessed passion for painting.

The artist was born in 1934 in Budapest. Between 1953 and 1956 he attended the Márffy Academy, later he studied in various free schools, where his masters were József Szalatnyai, István Varga Ilosvai and M
enyhért Tóth, among others.

His instinctive art, completely ignoring current art trends, is much closer to the French classical avant-garde (Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh), the art of the Fauvist Georges Rouault, and German Expressionism (Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner).

After the early, realistic works of Miklós Németh, he very soon developed a subjective and visionary language of painting, characterized by abundant color and a strong, rough form. He designed his compositions in a flat, mosaic-like way: he was more interested in the definite, dark contour line and the juxtaposition of clear spots of color than in the modeling of light and shadow. His explosive pictorial vehemence can also be observed in his compositional method: in his works he always completely fills the surface of the available paper, canvas or fibreboard, whatever its size, its forms almost elongate the available surface. Miklós Németh painted his compositions directly, without any prior studies or sketches. “The entire surface of the paper, the charm of the composition, the rhythms and the colors always caught his attention. This is how the visionary works of Miklós Németh, which are at the forefront of Hungarian art, were born. ”

He drew his world of topics rich in symbolic references primarily from his own experience, from the ordinary world around him. It is no coincidence that his works completely lack the critical overtone: he never politicized, he did not reflect on the social relations around him, he did not want to make a moral judgment through his painting. He just wanted to paint, with an overflowing passion, an exploding instinct for creative desire.

This is why the main thematic directions in the almost sixty-year oeuvre remained almost unchanged: the female nude, the embracing couple, the bittersweet world of clowns and harlequins, the landscape and cityscape, the strange characters of exotic countries, and the constant elements of self-portraits of the sixties and seventies. as his last paintings. Miklós Németh’s private mythology proclaimed the joy of life, sometimes cloudlessly happy, with childish naivety, other times with an ironic, self-critical overtone.

The works of Miklós Németh, who has been on the periphery of art life for a long time, have been exhibited in several Hungarian and even foreign galleries (Austria, Germany, USA) in recent years.