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László Lakner is not only among the inescapably significant figures of the Hungarian art scene but also one of the defining artists of the international arena. The complexity of an oeuvre that is thematically, stylistically and medially diverse – rich in metamorphoses and referential layers – is almost inexhaustible; yet it is precisely this multiplicity that draws the viewer in, this cosmos-like quality that beckons and to which one can respond only with sustained, active attention.

His practice, unfolding along multiple trajectories, is defined by continuous experimentation. This mode of working has nonetheless produced an oeuvre that remains coherent to this day: within it, stylistic tendencies that are wholly different and seemingly contradictory nonetheless complement one another in an internally consistent way. Numbering more than 4,000 works, the oeuvre encompasses paintings; unique and editioned prints; sculptures; objects; installations; environments; artists’ books; visual poems; conceptual text and sound works; performative and photo-based pieces; experimental films; and posters. Working with multiple layers of irony and ambiguity, Lakner has created a universe stratified by (art-)historical allusions and (self-)references. By following the networked lines of reference that run across the entire body of work, one may uncover the ontological and image-theoretical questions posed by an artist who examines – through acts of role-playing – cultural, national, linguistic and personal identity in a mode that simultaneously suspends and preserves it.

Two lives, two oeuvres: a brief overview of the narrowly defined reception history of Lakner

Painter and visual artist László Lakner was born in Budapest in 1936 and, with the help of a 1974 DAAD scholarship [Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst – German Academic Exchange Service], has remained “stranded” in Berlin ever since – although the city of Essen in the Ruhr region, together with the personal and professional ties associated with it, has also been formative at various points in his career. For a long time, emigration shaped the fragmented reception of his work, divided into Hungarian and German strands; this was further compounded by his numerous stylistic shifts, a sense of stylistic “non-belonging”, and an overall resistance to categorisation. Inadvertently, these factors generated palimpsest-like, divergent interpretations in the critical reception itself.

In Hungary, until roughly a decade ago, Lakner was still largely regarded as a member of the ‘Iparterv generation’ [a group of avant-garde Hungarian artists associated with the landmark Iparterv exhibitions of 1968–69], and discussed primarily in terms of surréalisme-inflected figuration related to Pop Art, as well as photorealism and conceptual art – with comparatively less emphasis placed on his graphic and sculptural practice. In Germany, by contrast, attention focused on his scriptural works, and he was examined as a key figure within the framework of German ‘Informel’ painting.

Among the early receptions, several texts must be mentioned that continue to function as decisive points of reference to this day: Judit Szabadi’s essay Lakner László művészete (lit. The Art of László Lakner, 1970), and Thomas Deecke’s study Malerei und Sujet bei L. L. (lit. Painting and Subject in the Work of L. L., 1979). Yet it was only two decades later that “the first genuinely synthetic publications on an oeuvre that by then already spanned more than three decades” were issued. [1] In 1994, in connection with the exhibition Lakner organised jointly with Emmett Williams (1925–2007) at the Goethe-Institut, Budapest, the multi-volume catalogue László Lakner: Index Nr. 1 was published – the first to articulate an explicitly comprehensive ambition.

It was in the 1990s that the reception history of Lakner’s work gained a systematic research orientation through the emergence of the art historian and curator Thomas Hirsch, who has since remained the artist’s most significant interpreter in Germany. In 1995, in issue 19 of Künstler Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst (lit. Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Artists), Hirsch was the first to attempt to bring Lakner’s various groups of works together within a single interpretative framework, under the title Spuren der Geschichte, Zeichen der Malerei. Über László Lakner (lit. Traces of History, Signs of Painting: On László Lakner). His focus, however, was restricted to Lakner’s German production, placing particular emphasis on notions of writing, inscription and memory. With regard to the artist’s early period, a comparable shift in emphasis can also be observed in János Brendel’s monograph Lakner László budapesti munkássága (lit. László Lakner’s Budapest Period, 2000), which analyses exclusively the Budapest years between 1959 and 1973.

The decisive moment arrived in 2004, when these “two oeuvres” were finally afforded their first opportunity to be treated as a unity within a single exhibition space. Under the title Metamorfózis (Metamorphosis), a retrospective exhibition of László Lakner opened at the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, which at the time was still housed in the Buda Castle. [2] The exhibition was curated jointly by Katalin Néray (1941–2007), as the artist’s Hungarian expert, and Thomas Hirsch as his German counterpart, and they opted for a chronological presentation of the oeuvre. Since Lakner’s oeuvre may itself be understood as a sequence of metamorphoses, the exhibition title – coined by the artist himself [3] – referred not only to this overarching principle but also deliberately evoked the painting Metamorfózis (Metamorphosis, originally titled Várakozók [Példázat] – lit. The Waiting Ones [Parable]), produced between 1964 and 1967, exhibited at the Fiatal Képzőművészek Stúdiója (Studio of Young Artists, Hungary) in 1967, and subsequently lost from view for many years. The artist himself later recalled this work as “the greatest painterly undertaking of that period.” [4]

Nevertheless, the exhibition was unable to explore the oeuvre in its essential depth. Key works that were difficult to access – such as Önarckép önkioldóval (lit. Self-Portrait with Self-Timer, 1970, Galleria degli Uffizi) – or works that were still unlocated, including Varrólányok Hitler beszédét hallgatják (Seamstresses Listening to a Speech by Hitler, 1960), were absent. [5] Even so, given the sheer number of contemporary reviews, essays and interviews, [6] the exhibition initiated a vivid discourse within the Hungarian professional scene on László Lakner’s oeuvre and on the frameworks of its reception and interpretation – a discourse that also generated a substantial body of new publications. [7]

Since then, the Laknerian oeuvre has accumulated further major milestones in its reception history. In 2008, the art historian Dávid Fehér began working systematically on László Lakner’s oeuvre; after ten years of research, data collection, cataloguing and documentation, he synthesised his findings in an internationally significant, several-hundred-page doctoral dissertation. This work was complemented by a comprehensive collection list striving for completeness and numbering more than 4,000 entries, as well as detailed analyses of numerous key works – thereby effectively “weaving together” the previously bifurcated oeuvre into a single whole. [8]

In 2020, the artist himself also contributed to his Hungarian, museum-based reception by donating a group of forty valuable works to the Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), selected from the major pieces of his post-emigration, German period. [9] The next milestone was marked by the large-scale retrospective exhibition held in 2022 at the MODEM Modern és Kortárs Művészeti Központ (MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen). Curated by Dávid Fehér, the exhibition focused on uncovering the hidden interconnections within the oeuvre, presenting key works that had long been inaccessible (Seamstresses Listening to a Speech by Hitler; Metamorphosis) [10], alongside other works that had not previously been exhibited. This was further reinforced by the publication, in 2023, of an impressive Hungarian–English exhibition catalogue, in which four scholarly essays seek to contextualise László Lakner’s extraordinary career and its principal works. [11] In 2025, another exhibition was realised in Budapest at the Vintage Galéria, concentrating on individual cycles or coherent units of the oeuvre that had not previously been shown in Hungary. [12]

Despite all this, the task of placing the artist’s work within a fully articulated, comprehensive interpretative framework cannot yet be regarded as complete from a scholarly perspective. Within its own limited scope, the present essay can therefore only attempt a necessarily selective and schematic overview of László Lakner’s oeuvre, isolating individual cycles or works, and doing so primarily on the basis of Dávid Fehér’s large-scale and foundational research.

On László Lakner’s life and work

Although the starting point for the comprehensive reception of the artist’s oeuvre is conventionally located, in the catalogues that document it, as early as the works produced during his secondary-school years (1950–54), the truly formative pieces emerged during his academy studies (1954–60). The initial, connective “key figures” who shaped Lakner’s artistic development were his two principal teachers: Balás László Viski (1909–1964) at the Képzőművészeti Gimnázium (Secondary School of Fine Arts, Budapest), and Aurél Bernáth (1895–1982) at the Képzőművészeti Főiskola (Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts). Lakner had already sought out Bernáth during his secondary-school years, while Viski frequently taught students who would later become Bernáth’s pupils, including Tibor Csernus (1927–2007), László Méhes (1944–2022), István Mácsai (1922–2005), Ignác Kokas (1926–2006), Katalin Sylvester (1927–2017), Margit Bárdy (1929–2025), and Gizella Péterffy (born 1943). [13]

As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, László Lakner was confronted simultaneously with the oppression of the socialist system, the reprisals following the 1956 Revolution [the nationwide anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary], and the prescriptive demands of socialist realism [the official aesthetic doctrine of state socialism]. Around 1957 he began to turn towards contemporary Western art, and American art in particular. Access to information about these developments beyond the Iron Curtain was, however, extremely difficult at the time. One of the rare opportunities was provided by the French Book Exhibition held in 1959 at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle, Budapest), [14] by the end of which “most of the books had been stolen by visitors.” [15] It was on this occasion that Lakner acquired Patrick Waldberg’s 1958 monograph Max Ernst.

Alongside the influence of Tibor Csernus, the leading figure of Hungarian “surnaturalism” [‘szürnaturalizmus’: a Hungarian variant combining surrealist strategies with naturalistic figuration], [16] this book enabled Lakner to study in depth the artistic tendency that proved decisive for this phase of his career. In the same year he painted Hajógyári hegesztők (lit. Shipyard Welders), which served as a precursor to the Hajógyári munkások (lit. Shipyard Workers) completed a year later. [17] In this work, Ernst’s quintessential “forest” motif is reinterpreted within a socialist realist thematic framework, transforming into a dynamic, expansive yet playful ensemble in which a figurative foreground is set against a surreal background of metallic components.

In this period, the influence of Ben Shahn (1898–1969) and his socially engaged realism also deserves particular emphasis. Shahn’s work offered an alternative to socialist realism in the field of socially oriented art, while at the same time serving as a precursor to the “new realist” tendencies that were beginning to emerge within figurative art (Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art). [18] In his early works, László Lakner addressed the theme of 1956 only rarely, and always indirectly: he never depicted the Revolution or the reprisals themselves, but rather recorded the conditions and situations that followed the historical event. In these works, one can either discern stylistic affinities with Ben Shahn’s art, or – in certain cases (as in Várakozás. Október 23 [lit. Waiting. 23 October, 1957]) – the predominance of a surrealist visual vocabulary.

In these years, Lakner developed a distinctive connection between 1956 and the figure of Sándor Petőfi [19^th-century national poet], the revolutionary poet, whose poetry or persona from this point onwards became a recurring motif in the Laknerian oeuvre. The archetype of the revolutionary artist would later constitute a significant component of Lakner’s modes of representation when addressing his own identity quest, as well as his sense of estrangement in Germany and during his New York scholarship of 1981–82.

All this, however, could only be realised in the way most of his contemporaries worked at the time: at home, hidden behind closed doors, he painted works aligned with forbidden “Western” tendencies, while for his academy studies he produced naturalistic paintings that conveyed the teachings of Aurél Bernáth. For his diploma defence in 1960, he did not submit works employing magical realist elements, Max Ernst-inspired surrealism, or the surnaturalism associated with Tibor Csernus [19], but rather works that were more in line with what he assumed to be the jury’s expectations: Shipyard Workers, 1960), Utolsó vacsora (Ebéd a szabadban 1945-ben) (lit. Last Supper [Luncheon on the Grass in 1945], 1959–60), and Manufakturális nyomda (lit. Manufacturing Printing House, 1960).

As with many of his contemporaries, Lakner’s diploma works were accompanied by heated debate; already during his academy years he had repeatedly been criticised on ideological grounds for his allegedly “destructive” influence. [20] All three works sought to meet ideological expectations through their depictions of workers, while simultaneously invoking art-historical traditions in such a way that these references are encoded and concealed within the process of pictorial construction, allowing contradictory meanings to be attached to the same motif. [21] In the case of Shipyard Workers, the pictorial narration reconfigures the architectural structure of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, reducing it to perspective as an organising pictorial principle. By contrast, Last Supper and Manufacturing Printing House evoke well-known motifs of Early Netherlandish painting, with the act of titling masking the traces of modern and sacred references alike. [22]

Among the diploma works, Manufacturing Printing House merits particular attention. The grisaille-toned painting, with its quasi-photographic appearance, can on the one hand be more readily grouped with Lakner’s later surnaturalist works; on the other, it already raises questions that would become central to his subsequent practice – concerning the relationship between image and photograph, as well as between text, letterform and painting, in conjunction with issues of reproducibility and irreproducibility. [23]

Following the acquisition of his diploma, László Lakner’s scope of action within the Hungarian artistic institutional system extended only to the category of the “tolerated” [‘tűrt’: the intermediate classification in the cultural policy of state socialism]. He received neither support nor scholarships, exhibition opportunities arose only rarely, and he was compelled to secure a livelihood for himself and his family through illustration and poster design. His first significant public appearance during his academy years was also connected to this field: in 1958 he was presented at the Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum (Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest) exhibition Magyar versek – magyar rajzok (lit. Hungarian Poems – Hungarian Drawings). [24]

Lakner’s paintings were accessible only to a narrow circle of friends, an informal public that gathered in his studio – a space that became increasingly significant, much like the artist’s own role after Tibor Csernus’s emigration in 1964. As Dávid Fehér has emphasised, “Lakner became the central figure of a circle of painters oriented first towards surrealism and later towards Pop Art, acting as a connective link between several different groups.” [25] Surrealist painting was indeed the dominant tendency within this circle between 1958 and 1964, after which Lakner, among others, also distanced himself from this direction.

From this period, coinciding with the years around his diploma defence, two key works stand out – pieces the artist himself regarded as “supplementary diploma works”: Szoba múltja (Egy szoba múltja repül) (lit. The Past of a Room [The Past of a Room Takes Flight]) (1961) and Seamstresses Listening to a Speech by Hitler (1960). These works underscore Lakner’s difference from the surnaturalism-inflected painting of his contemporaries, since from the outset his images operated with (decomposed) photographic sources and printed documents – and thus with historical pasts – and possessed a photorealistic character, even as they extended into the domain of abstraction. [26]

The former painting depicts objects animated by the wind in an attic room; its initial source motif derives from a 1936 edition of the Larousse encyclopaedia. Yet the inventory of artists and artistic movements, painterly traditions and references to the craft itself – violently flung into motion, half-concealed behind other elements, or else strikingly exposed – presents the viewer with a vision of the “world-attic” of history and memory, [27] as well as with modes of coming to terms with the past and of (re)constructing fictive pasts. [28] In doing so, and by spanning multiple dimensions, the work dissolves the physical and temporal distance between canvas and viewer.

The latter work, Seamstresses Listening to a Speech by Hitler, is not only a key piece within the oeuvre but, as the artist himself stated, “[…] my strangest and hardest painting […]”. [29] It may be regarded as Lakner’s first photo-based painting: for its source he used a 1937 documentary photograph published in April 1960 in a thematic issue of Magnum magazine entitled Have the Germans Changed? By doing so, he created a surreal processing of the past that simultaneously confronts the viewer with the perennial mechanisms of political mass manipulation. The composition – evoking both Frans Hals’s group portraits and the convex mirror of the Arnolfini Portrait – continues to assert the progressive, provocative radicalism of the work itself and, by extension, of the entire Laknerian oeuvre.

The jury of the painters’ circle and of the 1961 exhibition of the Studio of Young Artists, Hungary, to which Lakner submitted this painting, rejected what they described as the mercilessly frozen “future Ilse Kochs” [Ilse Koch – a notorious female perpetrator associated with Nazi concentration camps]. [30] The work’s suggestive depiction of the Holocaust – a subject tabooed under the Kádár regime [the socialist political system governing Hungary from the late 1950s to the late 1980s] – and of individual responsibility, articulated with a stance of “critical distance”, [31] proved unacceptable.

From these years onward, as Dávid Fehér has emphasised, the exploration of structures, along with the mechanics of depiction and visual representation, became an increasingly central concern in Lakner’s work. This interest was frequently intertwined with the figure of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), present throughout the oeuvre like a subterranean current, with the conceptual painting of “ready-made” elements, and with the international discourse on painting after painting (Laterna magica II., 1961; Politechnikai szertárszekrény [lit. Polytechnical Storage Cabinet], 1962–64; Duchamp fésűje [lit. Duchamp’s Comb], 1973–74). [32]

Closely related to this is the turning point of 1964, when Lakner received permission to travel on two occasions to Italy, both in the preceding year and thereafter. The works of the two winners of the 1964 Venice Biennale – Zoltán Kemény, representing Switzerland, and Robert Rauschenberg, representing the United States – shifted Lakner’s outlook “from surrealism towards a form of new realism: towards an art that ‘reflects its age’, responds to the paradoxes of life, and employs techniques of enlargement and cropping, as well as repetition within the image – a mode of image construction thus closely related to film.” [33] Alongside gestural painting and the collage-like procedures of Pop Art, and under the influence of film and photography, this approach also absorbed the Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro and brown tonalities characteristic of the period.

Hírek (News, 1964) thus marks the beginning of a new phase in Lakner’s work. Although it retains elements of surrealist form-making, the painting is already structured in a montage-like manner and employs motif repetition, critically subverting the mass-commodifying tendencies of American Pop Art. Instead of using silkscreen printing, Lakner reproduced everyday press photographs by painting them by hand – rendering the act of repetition itself unrepeatable.

Although, from behind the Iron Curtain, Lakner evokes and enters into dialogue with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon, or Antonio Recalcati, his most important precursor – and thus the point of departure for his alter egos – nonetheless proves to be Rembrandt. In these years, greater emphasis falls on socio-political issues (the Cold War; dictatorial, oppressive regimes), while, in dialogue with international tendencies, Lakner’s work nonetheless diverges in a distinctive way from American and British Pop Art, [34] by explicitly invoking the art-historical past. In this context, Rembrandt became for the painter a metaphor for a condition of existence deprived of the light of freedom; deep browns, olive greens and blacks correspond to sensations of confinement, anxiety and threat.

Alongside the painting Rembrandt-tanulmányok (lit. Rembrandt Studies, 1966), two further works from this cycle deserve particular attention, in which the (repeated) depiction of the predecessor’s self-portrait appears as a visual parable, while seeking the “moral mirror image” of dictatorship in the encounter between the face of power and the gaze of the individual: Engedelmesen (lit. Obediently, 1966) and Metamorphosis (1964–67). In the former, two pictorial fields are placed side by side as if frame by frame in a film sequence; this double-image formula becomes a recurring element in Lakner’s oeuvre from these years onward. In one field, an anti-hero suggestive of a Rembrandtesque self-portrait looks out at the viewer with a mocking, devilish smile, [35] while in the other the figure’s head is covered by a sack, symbolising enforced silence. In the latter painting, a multiple, rhythm-based metamorphosis unfolds: within the monumental composition, the transformation of three figures, deformed in a Bacon-like manner, can be observed as an aggressive tiger’s head turns into a sarcastically smiling male head that paraphrases a Rembrandt self-portrait: “Metamorphosis [...] is a parable of my generation’s experiences after ’45 and ’56 – of yesterday’s tigers assimilating into lambs, into innocent bourgeois citizens.” [36]

By the end of the decade, a significant shift occurs in Lakner László’s artistic procedure. Alongside a reduction in form-making, he increasingly turns towards the creation of more purified, often motif-repetition-based double images, focusing less on narrative phases and more on the processes of print reproduction as painted on the basis of photographic source material. [37] The subject of these works is “the dialectical play of identities and differences, and thus the nature of depiction and pictorial representation as a conceptual problem.” [38] From this cycle, I would single out the closely interrelated series that vary the motifs of mouths and roses, to which the artist’s first solo exhibition is also connected. In 1969, he was able to stage a summarising exhibition of his “Pop period” – at the same time continuing and concluding the Rembrandt series – at the Kulturális Kapcsolatok Intézete (Institute for Cultural Relations, Hungary). Through these two motifs, Lakner dialectically condenses a wide range of references and phenomena in his paintings: within the Pop Art elements, he simultaneously plays with Rembrandtesque browns and the Pop colours of Western liberation characteristic of the period; with the alienation of the object and, at the same time, its sexual charge; with the anxiety-based collective mood of socialist countries; with the compulsion to silence and America’s 1968 revolution and hippie culture; with the landscape-like depiction of body parts and the feminisation of masculine norms; and with the tradition of the surrealist Man Ray and its continuation in the Pop Art practice of Andy Warhol.

The Roses-series, however, comprises not only paintings but also a sculpture. In Hungary, only a handful of the artist’s sculptural works can be found in public spaces; these were generally realised through architectural commissions, largely thanks to Imre Makovecz (1935–2011), Lakner’s childhood friend. The monumental sculpture Rózsa (lit. Rose, 1969), based on object-enlargement in a manner analogous to the paintings, was originally intended for the garden terrace of the Halászbástya Étterem (Fisherman’s Bastion Restaurant, Budapest). For technical reasons it was initially not installed, and later its erection was rejected on the grounds of the artist’s emigration. In 1989 the sculpture finally found a home on the Rózsakert housing estate in Budapest’s 22nd district, where it has stood ever since – increasingly neglected and in deteriorating condition – as a memento of the contradictory and often invisible reception of Lakner’s works. [39]

Only a few weeks after the artist’s first solo exhibition, the second Iparterv exhibition was organised, [40] at which Lakner appeared with a radically different work: Kötél (Identitás) (lit. Rope [Identity], 1969), in which he exhibited both the object itself and its painted counterpart. In doing so, Lakner not only further conceptualised his own artistic practice and expanded the range of media he employed, but – together with others – also opened the conceptual chapter of Hungarian art history, [41] responding to the conceptual turn sweeping across Europe at the time in the wake of Harald Szeemann’s exhibition When Attitudes Become Form. [42] The work Rope engages not only with “the semiotics and semantics of representation and reproduction” [43] and with the problematics of identity and the apparent sameness of original and copy, but also with the layers of meaning attached to rope-based art both within Lakner’s own practice and in the international discourse, embedding within these historical traumas and contemporary political references alike.

During these years, the artist surveyed the social, political and artistic issues of his time with an almost encyclopaedic, interrogative intent – addressing the continuity of traditions, the processing of the past, within it often the engagement with particularly problematic periods of Hungarian history, and the effects of nostalgia. He did so in photorealist yet conceptually inflected, sensitive, thinly glazed paintings based on postcards, manuscripts, book covers, private and historical photographs, and documentary materials. He frequently painted the intellectual legacy, history and iconography of left-wing movements; in A forradalom emlékműve (Barikád) I. (lit. Monument to the Revolution [Barricade] I., 1970), a work conceived as part of a series, he combined nineteenth-century and contemporary political contexts with a semiotic layer of meaning, pairing these with painterly investigations into the physical properties of matter and perspective. At his first solo exhibition abroad after emigrating, he referred to the works of this period collectively as Összegyűjtött dokumentumok (lit. Collected Documents). [44]

Questions of identity – for instance, the subject concealed behind historical documents – continued to preoccupy the artist at this time. Yet it was only in Self-Portrait with Self-Timer (1970) that he depicted his own full-length, vulnerable, nude figure, evoking, among other references, Robert Morris’s body-art work I-Box (1965). The relationship between image and model was further explored in his performative photographic works and protest pieces (such as the Önmodellezések [lit. Self-Modellings] - series; the Kopernikusz [lit. Copernicus] - series; Holdnapló [lit. Moon Diary], 1970; Egy referenciapont: a Milói Vénusz töredéke [lit. A Point of Reference: Fragment of the Venus de Milo], 1971), in which he took himself as his own point of departure through humorous and ironic experiments in identification.

As Dávid Fehér has emphasised, [45] one of László Lakner’s most important performative projects was Futball a Szépművészeti Múzeumban (lit. Football in the Museum of Fine Arts – the “Foot-Art” project, 1970–71). For the 1972 Kassel documenta, curated by Harald Szeemann, Lakner proposed the idea of a football match: in samizdat-style collages circulated by post, Hungarian neo-avant-garde artists – imagined heirs to the legendary Aranycsapat [the Hungarian “Golden Team” football squad of the 1950s] – play within the spaces of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, and, in the utopian (ultimately unrealised) conception, within the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. Through this project, Lakner highlighted the (power) relations between centres and peripheries, the specific dynamics of the artistic field, questions of art’s social embeddedness, and the limits placed on the international integration of artists working behind the Iron Curtain. [46]

A further key issue in his conceptual works was the relationship between text and image, sign and meaning, and more broadly the media of writing and the book – which, as “pseudo-scientific language games”, also articulated social and political questions in a coded form [47] (Protesztvers [TUKTUK]. Nyelvgyakorlat reggelre – Protest Poem [TUKTUK]. Language Exercise for the Morning, 1970). The book as medium – pierced by bullets (a volume of Sándor Petőfi found in his parents’ attic in 1945, riddled with holes), then bound and suspended (around 1960 György Lukács dedicated a book to him in an antiquarian bookshop; Lakner hung it in his studio tied with string, and a decade later came to see it as an object exceeding the category of the ready-made – Én Lukács könyvem as object / Az én Lukács György könyvem as medium (lit. My Lukács Book / lit. My György Lukács Book, 1970)) – constitutes one of the most significant groups of works within the oeuvre. The book installation Esztétikák (lit. Aesthetics), conceived around 1970 but realised only in 1994, with volumes lined up and bound on the wall, interrogates the complexity of theory and practice through unreadability, while simultaneously invoking a historical parallel to insist on the inextinguishability of thought.

Within the nexus of words and images, alongside Lukács, the ideas of Paul Celan and Ludwig Wittgenstein subsequently became recurring themes and models in Lakner’s work. In the Idézetmű (lit. Quotation Work) series, he elaborates the existential experience of being enclosed within language, [48] another metaphor for insurmountable boundaries. From 1973–74 onwards, painted photo-based texts, manuscript paintings or “script portraits” became increasingly prominent and later exclusive subjects in his art, in which writing appears as the gesture and act of “the writing of Others.” [49] In 1974, after multiple forms of inner emigration, real emigration finally became possible through a DAAD scholarship. It was precisely this circumstance that intensified in these works the previously mentioned experience of “foreignness”: linguistic permeability between languages and contexts, demarcation lines, and the question of translation/translatability “as both motif and challenge.” [50]

The rhythmic copying of fragments of original documents or signatures may be read as an act of identification with major figures of cultural history (such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Hölderlin, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Miklós Radnóti), as a “re-enactment” of the subject behind the manuscript, or – in the case of the Schopenhauer series – as the interiorisation of a new environment, language and culture. Yet, conversely, certain layers of the cultural embeddedness of Lakner’s art remained enigmatic and foreign even to his new milieu(s). By the late 1970s he was producing works in his own handwriting, incising fragments into the dense monochrome surface of the canvas.

His New York fellowship in 1981 triggered an even more monumental and expressive phase. The fear of death – experienced indirectly through the dying struggle of his friend, the photographer György Lőrinczy (1935–1981) – together with isolation and existential anxiety, opened up new dimensions in his work. On vast sheets he painted scriptural works in a graffiti-like manner: the words of the Halotti beszéd és könyörgés (Funeral Sermon and Prayer, [the oldest known and surviving contiguous Hungarian text]) – “isa pur es chomou” (lit. “dust and ashes”) – in Rembrandt brown, now rendered as the colour of earth turned to dust (Isa pur series, 1981–83); and the opening oxymoronic line of Celan’s Todesfuge (Death Fugue) – Schwarze Milch (Black Milk, 1983–87) – which intertwines and reconstitutes itself in a smoke-like manner, [51] created anew through painterly writing. [52]

In relation to Celan, three further significant cycles merit brief mention. In 1993–94, Lakner renders a single Celan poem title in white across four black paintings of identical size, with gnarled, landscape-like structures, invoking a dimension of the sacred while simultaneously recalling the poet’s tragic death and the trauma of the Holocaust. [53] These works mark a turning away from scriptural image construction; alongside a more conceptual painterly direction, photography re-enters his practice as a medium, albeit in a new mode. In the photographic series A hely (lit. The Place, 1995), adopting an investigative, forensic perspective, Lakner traverses the streets of Paris along the presumed route of Celan’s suicide. Finally, in 2004 he returns to the poet’s figure by reconstructing Celan’s tense encounter with Martin Heidegger in a digital photomontage, using as a visual source a photograph of Heidegger taken during another meeting (Sétám Martin Heideggerrel Todtnaubergben 1970 [Walking with Martin Heidegger in Todtnauberg] 1970). Through the fictive dating, Lakner not only draws attention to the manipulated narrative of the work but also marks the year that intersects Celan’s death with his own first encounter with the poet’s writings – thus closing the series by looking back upon his own past (Self-Modellings). [54]

From 1982–83 onwards, László Lakner began to return regularly to Hungary, a possibility first afforded to him by the exhibition Tisztelet a szülőföldnek (lit. Homage to the Homeland) held at the Kunsthalle, Budapest. [55] From 1985 he produced sculptures in the former studio of Erzsébet Schaár, including the closely related relief Radnóti (1985–86), which since 2007 has stood in the garden of the Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest. This open-book-like relief bears the inscription IV. ecloga, incised by the artist’s finger into a bronze, mass-like structure whose “organically undulating, restless, agitated” surface reads almost as the material imprint of a momentary psychological state. [56]

Alongside Paul Celan, the identification with and paraphrasing of Miklós Radnóti became decisive in Lakner’s post-1980 period. At this time he also began producing small-scale works on paper and graphic pieces, including the Razglednica-series, in which he re-created Radnóti’s Bor notebook [the pocket notebook kept by Radnóti during his forced labour in Bor, Serbia in 1944, containing poems written shortly before his death in the Holocaust] – though the inscription is rendered almost illegible. [57] During the 1980s, gestures and structures that “preserve the traces of motoric hand movements” [58] became increasingly central to Lakner’s work. By scraping back impasto surfaces, these works evoke a palimpsest-like effect that appears almost to bleed, articulating inaccessibility and the limits of representation (the Lettre imaginaire-series).

From the 1990s onwards, the play with letters – their decomposition into structures and reconfiguration into new constellations, sometimes with geometric rigour, sometimes by dissolving it – became a key element of Lakner’s artistic procedure. The wordplay of his visual poems (Kukurikú, 1996) and the riddles of floating letters (Versképek [lit. Poem-Pictures], 1992, 2017) continue the avant-garde traditions of Kassák and Schwitters, while simultaneously addressing questions of linguistic identity and the relationship between sign and signifier. [59]

In the 2000s, Lakner’s work increasingly foregrounded, alongside cultural-historical references and polyphony, self-referentiality based on networked structures: an insistence on the coherent internal relations of the oeuvre, revealed through superimposed, metamorphosis-driven layers – through the palimpsest itself. The Kristályok (lit. Crystals) series of 2019 aptly symbolises this networked logic. By incising the contours of polyhedral forms into a monochrome surface, Lakner not only evokes this structural principle but also alludes to the mystical polyhedron in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, [60] thereby opening yet another dimensional gateway into the Laknerian universe.

[2025]

[1] Dávid Fehér: Avantgarde–Arrièregarde. Történetiség, képiség, referencialitás Lakner László művészetében (lit. Avant-garde–Arrière-garde: Historicity, Pictoriality, and Referentiality in the Art of László Lakner). PhD dissertation, Doctoral School of Philosophy, Programme in Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Budapest, 2018, p. 40. Source: https://edit.elte.hu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10831/40311/dissz_feher_david_filozofiatud.pdf (last accessed: 28 December 2025)

[2] László Lakner: Metamorfózis (lit. Metamorphosis). Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, 4 November 2004 – 30 January 2005.
Link: https://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/kiallitas/lakner-laszlo-metamorfozis (last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[3] Dávid Fehér: Az én alakzatai. Referenciák és identitások Lakner László művészetében (lit. Figures of the Self. References and Identities in the Art of László Lakner), pp. 7–77, here p. 10, in: Dávid Fehér (ed.), Lakner László. Alterego (lit. László Lakner. Alter Ego). MODEM, Debrecen, 2023.

[4] For the Virág Judit Gallery’s 2019 Contemporary Art Auction catalogue, a short study on this work was written by Dávid Fehér; see p. 80.
Source: https://viragjuditgaleria.hu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/lakner_14262.pdf (last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[5] On the research into the painting and the story of its successful rediscovery, see: Dávid Fehér: Lost and found. Az eltűnt varrólányok esete. Nyomozás Lakner László képe után (lit. Lost and Found. The Case of the Disappeared Seamstresses. An Investigation into a Painting by László Lakner). Artmagazin, 2010, no. 5, pp. 66–73.

[6] For a consolidated overview, see: Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 47.

[7] A list of László Lakner’s selected solo and group exhibitions can be consulted either under the ‘Lexikon’ tab of László Lakner’s profile, or, for the most important milestones from a reception-historical perspective, see: Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 48–49.

[8] See: Fehér 2018.

[9] See here: Kultúra.hu, 17 October 2020, https://kultura.hu/lakner-laszlo-mintegy-40-muvet-adomanyozta-a-szepmuveszeti-muzeumnak/; and here: Judit Jankó: Félmilliárdos adomány a Szépművészeti Múzeumnak (lit. A Half-Billion-Forint Donation to the Museum of Fine Arts), Világgazdaság, 9 November 2020, https://www.vg.hu/mutargy/2020/11/felmilliardos-adomany-a-szepmuveszetinek-2 (last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[10] Péter Emőd: Két élet, két életmű, kétféle recepció. Lakner László retrospektív a MODEM-ben (lit. Two Lives, Two Oeuvres, Two Kinds of Reception. László Lakner Retrospective at MODEM) (Interview with curator Dávid Fehér). A mű, 26 May 2022.
https://amu.hvg.hu/2022/05/26/ket-elet-ket-eletmu-ketfele-recepcio-lakner-laszlo-retrospektiv-a-modem-ben/ (last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[11] The international group of authors was likewise assembled by the exhibition curator in close collaboration with László Lakner. The four essays in the catalogue are by Dávid Fehér, as curatorial introduction and comprehensive study; Sarah Wilson, whose research focuses on new figurative tendencies of the 1960s; Eckhart J. Gillen, also an expert on post-war and Cold War art history, who has repeatedly included works by László Lakner in exhibitions he curated and also opened the artist’s solo exhibition at Galerie Georg Nothelfer; and Thomas Hirsch, the most important German interpreter of Lakner’s art mentioned above.

[12] László Lakner: Zahlen (lit. Numbers). Opened by Dávid Fehér. 28 January – 7 March 2025.
https://vintage.hu/hu/kiallitasok/lakner-laszlo-zahlen
László Lakner: Fragment Marcel Duchamp (lit. Fragment Marcel Duchamp). Curated by Dávid Fehér. 30 September – 14 November 2025.
https://vintage.hu/hu/kiallitasok/lakner-laszlo-fragment-marcel-duchamp
(last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[13] Bernáth Aurél Gallery: https://www.museum.hu/muzeum/869/Bernath_Aurel_Galeria?f

[14] Francia könyvkiállítás (lit. French Book Exhibition). Curated by F. Trebinjac and Irén Kirimi Kisdéginé. Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle, Budapest), 24 October – 8 November 1959.

[15] A nagy könyvlopás. Francia könyvkiállítás a vasfüggöny mögött (lit. The Great Book Theft: A French Book Exhibition Behind the Iron Curtain). Curated by Mária Árvai and Dániel Véri. Szentendrei Képtár (Szentendre Picture Gallery), 20 September 2019 – 1 March 2020. Source: https://femuz.hu/a-nagy-konyvlopas/ (last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[16] For clarification of the terminology, see Fehér 2018, op. cit., Lakner szürnaturalista és pop art-hoz köthető periódusának megjelenése, kapcsolatai és korabeli recepciója (1958–1970) (lit. The Emergence, Connections and Contemporary Reception of Lakner’s Surnaturalist and Pop Art–Related Period [1958–1970]), pp. 60–90; Lakner László és a szürnaturalizmus (lit. László Lakner and Surnaturalism), pp. 147–159; and, as a comprehensive study, cf. Sándor Hornyik: A szürnaturalizmus archeológiája (lit. The Archaeology of Surnaturalism), Institute of Art History, Research Centre for the Humanities – Eötvös Loránd Research Network, 2021. Online: https://real.mtak.hu/139111/1/Hornyik%20nyomdak%C3%A9sz.pdf (last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[17] From Dávid Fehér’s writings it emerges that this work surfaced only after fifty years (the artist had never exhibited it) and was in very poor condition. See Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 137, and Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 20.

[18] Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 128–129.

[19] In 1957–58 Tibor Csernus travelled to Paris, where, with the assistance of Simon Hantai, he became acquainted with a range of surrealist surface-forming techniques such as frottage, grattage and décalcomania; he was also influenced by French ‘informel’ painting and its experimental procedures related to automatic writing. See Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 148.

[20] Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 126 and 133.

[21] Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 136–137.

[22] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 134.

[23] Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 142–143.

[24] László Lakner recalled: “Those eight small-scale works on paper that I exhibited at the Petőfi Literary Museum – associations to poems by Petőfi, Ady and Kosztolányi – somehow determined the subsequent course of my life.” Annamária Szabó: Belevágtam az abszolút bizonytalanba (lit. I Took the Leap into Absolute Uncertainty). Interview with the painter László Lakner about the development of his career, the circumstances and effects of emigration, and chance encounters, prae.hu art portal, 15 May 2021. https://www.prae.hu/article/12104-belevagtam-az-abszolut-bizonytalanba/ (last accessed: 28 December 2025).

[25] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 63.

[26] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 150.

[27] Marina Varga: Kísérleti helyzetek. Nyomkövetés Lakner Lászlóval: pop art, fotórealizmus és koncept (lit. Experimental Situations: Tracing László Lakner – Pop Art, Photorealism and Concept), Műértő (vol. 18, no. 6), June 2015, pp. 10–11, here p. 10.

[28] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 22.

[29] Quoted by Dávid Fehér in his dissertation from the interview conducted by Edit Szentesi with László Lakner between 8 and 10 October 1988, published in collected form in 1991 (Edit Szentesi: Beszélgetés Lakner Lászlóval (lit. Conversation with László Lakner) [8 and 10 October 1988, Hungarian National Gallery Archives: 23117/1990], in Ildikó Nagy (ed.): Hatvanas évek. Új törekvések a magyar képzőművészetben (lit. The Sixties: New Tendencies in Hungarian Fine Art), exhibition catalogue, Hungarian National Gallery, Képzőművészeti Kiadó – Hungarian National Gallery – Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 1991, pp. 125–137). See Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 159.

[30] See Dávid Fehér: Lakner László: Varrólányok Hitler beszédét hallgatják (lit. László Lakner: Seamstresses Listening to a Speech by Hitler), ed. Dávid Fehér, exhibition catalogue, Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), 2011.

[31] Sarah Wilson: Lakner László szenvedélye (lit. The Passion of László Lakner), in Fehér 2023, op. cit., pp. 80–109, here p. 84.

[32] Fehér 2023, op. cit., pp. 14, 26 and 160.

[33] Quotation from the above-mentioned interview by Edit Szentesi, cited in Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 28.

[34] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 191.

[35] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 30.

[36] Varga 2015, op. cit., p. 11.

[37] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 223.

[38] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 224.

[39] Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 243 and 245–246.

[40] On the exhibitions curated by Péter Sinkovits in the downtown headquarters of the Industrial Building Design Company, which were open only for a few days, as well as on the artists involved and their socio-political and art-historical significance, see Viktória Popovics (ed.): IPARTERV 50+ 1968/69–2019. Ludwig Múzeum – Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum (Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art), Budapest, 2019.

[41] See Kötél és identitás (esettanulmány) (lit. Rope and Identity [Case Study]). In: Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 248–264.

[42] When Attitudes Become Form. Curated by Harald Szeemann. Kunsthalle Bern, 22 March – 27 April 1969.

[43] Sarah Wilson: Lakner László szenvedélye (lit. The Passion of László Lakner). In: Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 92.

[44] Laszlo Lakner. Gesammelte Dokumente (1960–1974) (lit. László Lakner. Collected Documents). Neue Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, 30 November 1974 – 26 January 1975.

[45] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 42.

[46] Only decades later did the artist recover his submitted proposal, which he published as an artist’s book in 2010 and which was then presented in 2011 at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, under the title Helyszíni szemle – A múzeum a múzeumban (lit. On-Site Inspection – The Museum within the Museum) (22 July – 23 October 2011. Curated by Katalin Székely and the curatorial collective of the Ludwig Museum). For a detailed overview see Fehér 2018, op. cit., pp. 308–312.

[47] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 44.

[48] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 274.

[49] Modification by László Lakner of Dávid Fehér’s translation, who translated into Hungarian Thomas Hirsch’s German-language interview with the artist. See Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 342.

[50] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 353.

[51] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 369.

[52] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 64.

[53] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 70.

[54] Ibid., p. 72.

[55] Tisztelet a szülőföldnek. Külföldön élő magyar származású művészek II. kiállítása (lit. Homage to the Homeland. Exhibition II of Hungarian-Born Artists Living Abroad). Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle), 17 December 1982 – 30 January 1983.

[56] Brigitta Muladi: Por és hamu… Lakner László kiállítása és Radnóti szobra (lit. Dust and Ashes… László Lakner’s Exhibition and His Radnóti Sculpture). In: Új Művészet, 2007, no. 10, pp. 34–35, here p. 35.

[57] Fehér 2018, op. cit., p. 379.

[58] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 320.

[59] Fehér 2023, op. cit., pp. 74–76.

[60] Fehér 2023, op. cit., p. 366.

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