Endre Rozsda - Surrealism as a research space

Endre Rozsda ( 1913 - 1999, Paris) was a Hungarian-French painter. By the evidence of his writings, Endre Rozsda was mainly preoccupied with the problem of capturing time through the medium of painting. Time that can be experienced and explored by the subjective mind.
"For Rozsda, subjectivity represented more than the depiction of emotions, he somehow wanted to capture consciousness itself through painting – the process during which the human being creates his or her own world. In accordance with this, the painterly representation of time – depicting time past and time unfathomable – rather than the representation of perspectival space, became the other guiding principle of Rozsda’s painting. Rozsda’s painting “technique” – the nonfigurative structure of the paintings and their rotation during the working process, which eliminates the illusion of real space while mysteriously also retaining it (in many pieces and in its details) – also points in this direction of surreal space and time”, art historian, Sándor Hornyik, explains....From the start of the 1970s his paintings feature more detail than ever before. ..Accordingly, he built up images by allowing small details to rearrange themselves in random variations – in the mind of the beholder. Endre Rozsda had the ambition of making the viewer part of the creative process. To reach that end, he developed a method where first he breaks the world into an infinite variety of – some figurative, some abstract – component parts, then allows each viewer to use these as building blocks and construct a new totality along his/her vision, free association and imagination. Surrealism offered Rozsda the tool to give pictorial representation to his personal memories and fantasy, yet he aimed for something more: he wished to make the viewer his collaborator whose gaze helps to re-create an atomized and deconstructed world. Wikipedia

Endre Rozsda

Endre Rozsda (18 November 1913, Mohács – 17 September 1999,) was a Hungarian-French painter.
Rozsda was born in Mohács, south Hungary on 18 November 1913. At the age of 18 he started to paint in the school of Vilmos Aba-Novak. He had his first solo exhibition at the Tamas Gallery in Budapest in 1936, with great success. His work at this period mostly belonged to post-impressionism until he attended a concert at the Academy of Music, and heard Béla Bartók play his "Sonata composed for two pianos and percussions". "I was drunk from that music. I felt it criticizes my art. I understood that I am not my own contemporary." . In 1938 he settled in Paris and discovered surrealism, meeting Picasso, Arpad Szenes, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Etienne Hajdu, Giacometti, Max Ernst and Françoise Gilot.

 After the German occupation of Paris he had to return to Budapest. In 1945 he was one of the founders of the European School of modern art in Hungary. After 1948 all non-official art forms were prohibited by the Communist regime, so Rozsda painted in secret and never exhibited. Fleeing from Communist repression in Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Rozsda returned to France.

 He had many exhibitions at the Furstenberg Gallery (1957, 1963, 1965), where the preface to the catalogue was written by André Breton, who wrote "We have the chance to find out in the paintings accomplished secretly by Rozsda during the last few years, and which good fortune allowed him to bring with him into exile. Here is the supreme example of what had to be kept hidden if one wanted to survive, and, equally, of the inner necessity that had to be snatched from the vilest coercion. Here the forces of death and love are pitted against each other; everywhere under the magma of blackened leaves and broken wings irresistible forces are seeking a way of escape so that nature and the human spirit may renew themselves through the most sumptuous of sacrifices, that which the spring demands in order that it may be born."

 In 1961, Rozsda participated in the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Gallery Schwarz in Milan, Italy. The same year, his works were exhibited in memory of "L’Art Dégéneré" at the Alte Pinakothek of Munich and at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris.
In the 1960s he continued creating his work, transcending surrealism. In 1964 he received the Copley Prize (USA) from a jury composed of Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Darius Milhaud and Marcel Duchamp.
He became a French citizen in 1970 and moved to the Bateau Lavoir. He died in Paris on 17 September 1999.Wikipedia