Emil Parrag

Hungarian painter, born 1925 in Teleki, Hungary and died in 2019. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest. Parrag painted in a figurative, expressionist style in the 1960's, in strong opposition to the Communist Party and its directives that propagated socialist realism in the arts. His choice meant that his work was not exhibited in the Cold War era with the resultant financial and existential insecurities. During this period he used a dominantly darker palette. From the 1990's his palette lightens and, in his new form of expressionism, he combines figurative compositions with techniques developed from his abstract expressionist and structuralist experiments of the two interim decades.