Miklos Pogany
Hungarian-born Maine resident, Miklos Pogany, was a prolific artist with an impressive exhibition history and work in the permanent collections of many major museums. A master of multiple media, Pogany created vivid works based on nature and the built environment, exploring and pushing the parameters of each medium.
Being an artist is, for me, my response to being alive. I react to wonder, desires, conflicts, meanings, memories, revenge, sexuality, love and death. I gather all these life’s fragments and make some personal sense of it all. I am a record keeper of history and a maker of one. I want to know magic and I want to see the invisible. Innumerable artists’ voices – the Lascaux cave drawings, Turner, Matisse, Braque, Malevich, Rauschenberg, Mondrian, to name just a few, have informed my life journey as an artist, as a maker of meaning. Maybe my art will offer serenity and peaceful contemplation like a Morandi still-life, maybe a sense of conjuring like Jackson Pollock, maybe a journey map to wander in like Richard Diebenkorn.”~ Miklos Pogany (2019)
Pogany left a prestigious position on Northwestern University’s faculty to pursue a career as a visual artist. His unorthodox path is a factor in the uniqueness of the artist's voice and process. Poet and critic, John Yau, described Pogany as not connected to any art or literary scene…..Pogany belongs to that group of sophisticated, self-educated artists in America that includes figures as diverse as Joseph Cornell, Robert Ryman, and Jasper Johns. In contrast to these artists, Pogany has never been associated with any group or stylistic tendency. He has pursued a path that is all his own, and that is what we should keep in mind when looking at his work…..He did not go to art school, but it would be wrong to think of him as an outsider artist because he received no formal art education. Moreover, as an artist who first gained attention in the early 1980s, when he was in his mid-30s, Pogany did not employ any of the stylistic tendencies associated with that hyperbolic era, which has been characterized as the “Return of Painting.” Pogany was neither a Neo-Expressionist nor a Neo-Geo artist. I think the only way to see Pogany is as an independent artist who has always followed his own vision–one that speaks to our feelings in the face of fragility, solitude, and anxiety.
Pogany had many solo exhibitions over the course of his long and prolific career, including a major show at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., at Associated American Artists, New York, the Paul Mellon Art Center, Wallingford, CT, Miklos Pogany, “Artist’s Showcase”, sponsored by The Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Hartford, CT, at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT, and at Impressions Gallery (NY and Boston), and at Danese Corey and Victoria Munroe Galleries (New York). His work is in many prestigious public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, The Phillips Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library, Yale University Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Christian Science Center, Boston, The Lois and Michael Torf Collection, Boston, MA, and the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts in San Francisco.
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