Knoll Gallery Vienna & Budapest

Ákos Birkás is well known with his abstract „head“ paintings from the 1980s and 1990s. Here we show earlier figurative works, from the late 1960s to 1980.

Ákos Birkás was born in Budapest in 1941. He received his training as an artist in socialist Hungary at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. In the years after the academy, he was able to show his early works in only a few small exhibitions in socialist Hungary until the beginning of the 1980s. This changed when the first countries in Western Europe began to show the Hungarian avant-garde of painting in the 1980s in group exhibitions, such as with director Wilfried Skreiner at the Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz from 1985, the Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna in 1987, the Knoll Galerie Vienna and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden New York in 1988. This was followed by participation in international thematic exhibitions from 1989 onwards: for example GegenwartEwigkeit in the Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, Kunstlandschaft Europa in Bremen. His participation in the Hungarian pavilion at the Venice Biennale 1986 (with I. Bak and I. Nádler) was a surprise. International solo exhibitions began in 1987, for example, in the Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz, in 1989 in the Knoll Gallery Vienna, in 1991 in the Städtische Galerie in the Museum Folkwang Essen and in the De Gele Rinder Amsterdam. In the following years, numerous exhibitions followed in galleries such as Bernard & Gwénolée Zurcher Paris, Janssen Brussels, Eigen+Art Berlin, Galerie Curtze Düsseldorf and Vienna. A major international solo exhibition took place in 1996 in the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna (cat.), which was followed by numerous solo exhibitions in museums and art associations, especially in Germany, as well as in Budapest in the Ludwig Museum Budapest in 2006 (cat.) and in the MODEM in Debrecen. From the late 1980s – 2003 he lived alternatively in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest. Birkás died in Budapest in 2018.

Knoll Gallery Wien started in the mid 1980s and opened a branch in 1989 in Budapest as the first private, international and commercial gallery in the still existing East Bloc.