Janos Urban (1934)
Switzerland


Biography :

After graduating from the Secondary School of Fine and Applied Arts in Budapest, Janos Urban studied art history from 1953 to 1956, the year of his exile in Switzerland as a political refugee due to Soviet military repression. . From then on stateless, he continued his training as an artist with Jaques Berger at the École cantonale des beaux-arts in Lausanne and obtained his diploma in 1961. That same year, he was admitted to the Society of Swiss Painters, Sculptors and Architects (SPSAS) and exhibited for the first time at the l'Entracte gallery, which will present his work on several occasions. He discovered Western Europe and spent time in Paris and Spain in particular. In 1963, he married the artist Jacqueline Nicod and began teaching at the École cantonale d’art in Lausanne. He exhibited, among others, at the Palette gallery in Zurich in 1970, at the Impact gallery in Lausanne in 1972 and at the Simon I. Patiño Contemporary Art Center in Geneva in 1974, not to mention personal exhibitions in Hildesheim, Brescia and Modena and the multiple participations in collectives in Europe and, soon, throughout the world. In 1974, he received the Landis & Gyr Foundation Prize. In 1977, he obtained Swiss nationality. In 1984, Urban was affected by a mental illness which kept him away from his studio for ten years. It was not until 1994 that he resumed his work.

After having experienced, during his training years, the poetic naturalism and surrealism of the Hungarian school in Budapest, Urban practices, in Lausanne, an abstract expressionism sometimes monochrome sometimes colorful with material effects inspired by Antoni Tàpies. From 1963, the trace, the unassignable imprint asserted itself in reliefs and hollows on the canvas modeled using polyvinyl impregnation, as in Peinture (1966). From 1967, his paintings became real installations or environments that question optical phenomena; behind a Plexiglas screen they integrate polyester elements exploiting the luminescence of the phosphor; they are sometimes lit by an ultraviolet beam intercepting the silhouette of the viewer. The artist gradually exploits all technical means of energy transmission and is interested in electric, electromagnetic, infrared, solar and cosmic waves.

In 1970, Urban crossed the threshold of conceptual art, of which he became one of the pioneers in Switzerland. From purely optical phenomena, he moves on to the messages of which they are the supports. According to his credo: “The work is open. It knows no limits, since it results from the continuous interaction of space and time", he creates video montages and scripto-visual works in perpetual evolution, in the manner of the collective of British artists Art and Language. For example, using statistical, linguistic, graphic and photographic means, he opens documentary files, questioning, in the mode of poetic reporting, a place and its inhabitants, such as the Lipari Islands in Approach to the Islands (1972), work group produced with his students, or even in Erlebte Erdteile (1970-1974). Praxis (1976), a collection of the conceptual works he had carried out up to that point, is organized into an autobiography as an apprehension of places and times through a conscience. Here the artist somehow makes his own journey perceptible, both exterior and interior, in his perpetual dialogue with the world, both on the level of perception and that of thought.

In 1984, as health problems manifested themselves, Urban broke with conceptual art and produced a series of moving elegiac paintings centered on the theme of the Mediterranean and its sites, which he would not show until eleven years later. After a decade marked by illness, he resumed pictorial activity in the mid-1990s, imagining New Landscapes in the form of encounters between the conscious and the unconscious. In the year 2000, he focused on rendering his impressions of Egypt in very colorful watercolors, and then became interested in the genre of portraiture.

Institutional collections (selection): Geneva, Lausanne Museum of Art and History, Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts.
(Source, website, SIK)

Works :
lien
Country