Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art is delighted to announce its successful presentation of a selection of museum-quality works by Hungarian artist István Nádler from the late 1960s and early 1970s in the SPOTLIGHT section of Frieze Masters, which opened in London on 15 September 2025.

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István Nádler (b. 1938) was a member of the Zugló Group from the early 1960s and later took part in the neo-avant-garde movement that emerged in the mid-1960s, as well as in the landmark Iparterv I (1968) and Iparterv II (1969) exhibitions. His painting is rooted both in the Hungarian constructivist avant-garde tradition of Lajos Kassák and in the broader international neo-avant-garde. The liberated self-construction of his art was made possible through the discovery and deeper understanding of lyrical abstraction in the 1960s. During this period, he and his friends Sándor Molnár, Imre Bak and Pál Deim studied the work of Jean René Bazaine, Pierre Soulages, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Alfred Manessier, before turning to the more forceful and dramatic gesture painting of American abstract expressionism. In the early phase of his career, he created a distinctive pictorial world that drew on these two key sources of inspiration.

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Under the influence of hard-edge painting, his geometric period gave prominence to the use of homogeneous colour fields and folkloric motifs—among them the Avar motif, which became a symbol of Central and Eastern European cultural tradition in his works. As his monographer Lóránd Hegyi noted, “In Nádler’s art, the homogeneous colour field, its inner glow and the radiance of the colours ignite the geometric structures.”

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In the 1970s, the experience of music and landscape profoundly shaped his painting: through Bartók’s music, he was drawn closer to the formal world of folk art and discovered the creative attitude of archaic man. Our aim is to bring new light to István Nádler’s early oeuvre for an international audience and to contribute to the reevaluation of Eastern European painting of the period.

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On view: 15 October – 17 October 2025
Location: Regent’s Park, London

Booth S26