Gábor Kozák’s collection at the ArtMill
MúzeumCafé 46.
The contemporary fine arts private collection of Gábor Kozák has been exhibited several times in recent years, presenting its current state, main themes and evolution. From March 2015, parts of the collection, selected by two curators, can be seen in Szentendre’s ArtMill. Two different perspectives are applied to the collection, which now contains 240 items, to illuminate its interpretations and development.Gábor Kozák is one of the best-known figures of the contemporary art trade. He is associated not only with the Godot Gallery, but due to his activity over the past 20 years he has become a significant collector. Kozák typifies the person who, with the employment of persistent hard, consistent work, has learned the ropes of the art trade and the hidden secrets of collecting. Immediately after finishing secondary school, he studied art management at the Casus Arts Institute, but he acquired real, practical experience in the Illárium Gallery, set up jointly with his mother Erzsébet Illár. The Illárium, located in Köztársaság Square from 1995, was one of the few commercial galleries of the time which, while continuing to keep the possibility and necessity of selling in mind, at the same time organised art projects. Kozák got to know those artists with whom he would later developed close working connections. Already at the time he found a common voice with artists who worked in traditional artistic genres but had a characteristically individual, sharp way of seeing the world. The Illárium staged exhibitions of works by the older generation as well as artists who graduated in the first half of the 1990s. It is by no means accidental that the first painting he purchased in 1998 was János Kósa’s Hackers, an iconic work which, foretelling to a certain extent Gábor Kozák’s credo, uses the language of painting to speak about contradictions spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.