Gyorgy Kepes
György Kepes was a Hungarian-born painter, photographer, designer, educator, and art theorist. In 1937 he taught design at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. In 1967 he founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught until his retirement in 1974.
At age 18, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he studied for four years with Istvan Csok, a Hungarian impressionist painter. In the same period, he was also influenced by the socialist avant-garde poet and painter Lajos Kassak.
He has also worked with artists and architects, including Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, and became increasingly interested in visual theory and technology, studying devices that captured unseen images like x-ray machines, electron microscopes, sonar, and radar. |
Kepes’ paintings have a photographic and chemical-like quality to their colors and format, often resembling burned celluloid negatives uncovered from the ground or infrared images of plants and organisms.