KOSICE Gyula

Košice, Czechoslovakia (today Slovakia), April 26, 1924
Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 25, 2016

Gyula KOSICE

Semicurvas, Relieve Luminco, 1947/2006

Neon gas, plexiglass, and wood
20 1/4 x 24 1/4 in. (51.44 x 61.59 x 18.41 cm.)

 

Kosice_2

Gyula KOSICE

Obra luminica movil, 1950

Five acrylic columns, moto, light
22 13/16 x 11 13/16 x 11 13/16 in. (58 x 30 x 30 cm.)

 

Madí– One of the spin-offs of the group that published the magazine Arturo, along with the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. The movement was founded among others by Carmelo Arden Quin, Gyula Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss and Martín Blaszko, with an exhibition at the Van Riel Gallery (Buenos Aires) and with the launch of the Madí Manifesto (1946). They intended to overcome the lack of universality in concrete art by creating eternal objects with an absolute value, not just through the visual arts but also through music, dance and other art forms. A dispute among its leaders triggered a rift within the movement: Arden Quin went on to pursue further the spread of Madí art from Paris, while Kosice did the same around the Río de la Plata and published the magazine Arte Madí Universal (Universal Madí Art). Artists such as Antonio Llorens and Volf Roitman were also involved in the movement.

Arturo- Magazine published in 1944 by Tomás Maldonado, Édgar Bayley, Carmelo Arden Quin, Gyula Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss and Lidy Prati. Aggressively spirited in its desire to break up with the various trends of figurative art and to catch up with the times and with the international avant-garde, Arturo emerged as the foundational milestone of Argentina’s abstract-geometric and constructivist art. “Invention” and “irregular framework” stood out among the concepts that were featured in the magazine, and they exerted a substantial influence on the aesthetics and ideas of the groups that were to emerge as its successors, the Association of Concrete Art-Invention and Madí, since Arturo did not go beyond the first issue.

Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención- One of the spin-offs of the group that published the magazine Arturo, along with the Madí movement. The artists that rallied around this magazine had already shown their work under that name in 1945. However, the Association was only officially launched in 1946, with an exhibition at the Salón Peuser (Peuser Hall, Buenos Aires). With Tomás Maldonado as its main leader, supported among others by Alfredo Hlito, Lidy Prati, Raúl Lozza, Enio Iommi, Manuel Espinoza and Juan Melé, the Association advocated art that was in line with scientific and technological progress and which prevailed over reality not by copying it but by inventing new objects instead. It restricted its scope strictly to the visual arts, design and architecture, in opposition to the multidisciplinary nature of the Madí movement.

Of Hungarian origin, Gyula Kosice  (born Fernando Fallik) arrived in Argentina with his family in 1928. He studied drawing and modeling, and in 1944, interested in vanguard art, he founded with others the magazine Arturo, which supported non-figurative art. The same year, he made Ryi, his first abstract sculpture, with movable parts that invited the spectator to transform it. When the Arturo group dissolved, Kosice participated in the exhibitions of the Asociacin Arte Concreto-Invencin (1945) and joined the Mad movement (in 1946) together with Carmelo Arden Quin, Martin Blaszko and Rhod Rothfuss.

The members of the Mad group questioned the lack of universality of concrete art. Their approach was, rather, to invent and create objects with timeless and absolute value. In 1946, Kosice initiated his Estructuras lumnicas con gas nen, works that for the first time used neon tubes as part of his investigations into the use of new materials and technologies. At the same time he was also produced paintings with trimmed frames and a variety of metallic sculptures.

In 1947, after the publication of the Madi manifesto and the organization of some exhibitions, a dispute arose between Kosice and Arden Quin. This caused a split in the Mad movement. Arden Quin went to Paris, while Kosice and Rothfuss continued exhibiting Mad art in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. They published the magazine Arte Mad Universal, directed by Kosice. In 1947, Kosice had his first solo exhibition (Galeras Pacfico, Buenos Aires), in which he displayed works made with aluminum, Plexiglas and neon light. By this time, the trimmed frame of his paintings had disappeared and the color planes were freed of constraint. With the Mad group he participated in important group exhibitions, such as Arte Nuevo (Saln Kraft, Buenos Aires, 1947), Saln des Ralits Nouvelles (Paris, 1948) and Saln Nuevas Realidades (Galera Van Riel, Buenos Aires, 1949).

In 1948, Kosice made his first experiments integrating water and art and produced his Esculturas hidrocinticas. During the 1950s and 1960s, he continued developing his work, both with luminance current and hydrokinetics, which he combined in some cases. In 1954, he stopped publishing Arte Mad Universal, and in 1957, he moved to Paris. There, his hydrokinetic works reached greater dissemination with the launching of the manifesto La arquitectura del agua en la escultura (1959) and the exhibition Sculptures hydrauliques (Galerie Denise Ren, 1960). In 1964, he returned to Argentina.

The publishing of the manifesto La ciudad hidroespacial (1971) began a new stage of Kosice’s career. In it, he proposed a solution to worldwide overpopulation through a project of urban habitat animated by hydraulic energy located at 1,500 meters of altitude. The works that he made for this project, which in reality were scaled-down models, constituted a synthesis of art, science, technology and science a fiction. Throughout this decade, he presented this project in several exhibitions, including ones at the Espace Pierre Cardin (Paris, 1975) and the Planetarium Galileo Galilei (Buenos Aires, 1979).

Kosice created numerous works for public spaces, including Faro de la cultura (La Plata, Argentina, 1982), Victoria (Olympic Park, Seoul, Korea, 1988), and Monumento a la democracia (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2000). Recently he has been recognized in Argentina with several awards, amongst them the Premio a la Trayectoria en Artes Plsticas (Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1994) and the Premio Cultura Nacin (Secretara de Cultura de la Nacin, 2007).