KANTAR FINE ARTS presents the artist and master printmaker, MIKLOS POGANY, in a retrospective exhibition of his unique collage monotypes. Mixed Media showcases a selection and evolution of his work over the past twenty years.

Detail: Une Jour de Marriage

Miklos Pogany, whose grandmother was the Mlle. Pogany who inspired the famous Brancusi sculpture of that name, was hailed as “an artist of great sensitivity...(and) also a fine colorist,” by Willem de Looper, the former Curator of The Phillips Collection, at the time of Pogany’s solo show there, in 1985. A self-taught artist, Pogany has continually stretched the limits of each printing technique he explored, particularly monotype, realizing wonderfully complex surfaces, by using a unique technique, which he developed, with different papers (including supermarket shopping bags!) and other materials for his plate, and overlaying the surface with layers of ink, oil colors, pastels, crayons, chalks, and oil stick. His abstractions and more representational works emanate a mysterious, emotional quality, and suggest a moment in the passage of time, a moment of being that could transform itself at the next glance. Colors, textures, lines and shapes are subtly connected and interdependent.

Bird of Paradise

Pogany has had many solo exhibitions, including a major show at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., at Associated American Artists, New York, the Paul Mellon Art Center, Wallingford, CT, Miklos Pogany, “Artist’s Showcase”, sponsored by The Connecticut Commision on the Arts, Hartford, CT, at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT, and at Impressions Gallery (NY and Boston), and Victoria Munroe Gallery (New York). His work is in many prestigious public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, and, nationally, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library, Yale University Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Christian Science Center, Boston, The Lois and Michael Torf Collection, Boston, MA, and the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts in San Francisco.

Une Jour de Marriage

He is also represented in the collection of global corporations, including AT&T, The Bank of America, Biogen, Chemical Bank, Mobil Corporation, and Solomon Brothers.

Miklos Pogany was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1945, educated in Italy and the United States, receiving an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. In 1972, after being a Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature for several years, he decided to become an artist. He is self-taught. He is currently on the Faculty of the Art Department at Buckingham, Browne & Nichols Schools, in Cambridge, MA.

Detail: Une Jour de Marriage (2)

“One of the strongest traditions in contemporary American art is exemplified by the self-taught artist. In Pogany’s case, the application of self-taught, often innovative technique in monotype, their influence on his work in other mediums, has been strongly affected by the artist’s thorough grounding in literature and philosophy. In fact, what distinguishes his abstractions from those of his contemporaries is their metaphysical content.

“Color is used to evoke a season and a place, or a specific kind of light....” - John Lau, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1985

Richard S. Field, former Curator, Yale University Art Gallery, in an essay for Pogany’s catalogue for his Associated American Artists exhibit, December 1989, extolled Pogany’s work, calling it “a rich and monumental series of prints.”

“Pogany’s monotypes, though suffused with the compression of printing, and unfailingly responsive to the beautiful papers on which they are printed, appear very much like painted low reliefs; and the etchings, though composed of line and texture, only spring to life when endowed with the mysterious space of Pogany’s color, applied both before and after printing.” Richard S. Field, AAA catalogue, 1989

Wings of the Gifted Child

In recent years, other natural forms, including the human form, have entered Pogany’s artistic language using the vitrograph process, or sandblasting several glass plates, infusing them with color, then printing.

The Place where the words come from

Editions of 20 or 30 were possible, with each print often enhanced by the artist with pastel or printer’s ink, making for a ‘variant edition.’