It is difficult to classify Margit Anna’s works as belonging to any one artistic movement; a significant part of her œuvre can be best described along the lines of surrealism and expressivism. She created a unique formal idiom that made her one of the most outstanding figures of Hungarian painting. Sensuality and unflinching clear-sightedness are both salient characteristics of her art, which combined elegant decorativeness with soul-searching.
The lyrical, associative painting she developed in the 1930s on the model of Chagall’s methods changed after the tragic death in 1944 of her husband, painter Imre Ámos. Childlike in their rendering and distinguished by vast heads, the dummies she painted during her time with the European School spoke for her and represented a suffering inexpressible in human terms. Absurd humour and sarcasm came to mark her pictures in the 1950s and 1960s more and more.
‘If you take a careful look at my pictures, you will see that this is a bitter biography. No one is born bitter, but they will become bitter when they are given a life that is as hard to cope with as a war.’ Almost fifty years after her last exhibition, this retrospective at the Hungarian National Gallery presents her life and œuvre through almost two hundred works of art.

The exhibition is on view between 9 April and 1 September.