ArtistHungarian-Swedish
Endre Nemes
1 active items
Endre Nemes was born Endre Nágel on November 10, 1909, in Pécsvárad, Hungary. He changed his surname to Nemes in 1928. After studying philosophy briefly in Vienna in 1927, he moved to Prague around 1930, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and worked as a cartoonist. In Prague he met Peter Weiss and Bernard Reder and collaborated with Jakub Bauernfreund. His compositions of the 1930s drew clearly on Surrealism, shaped by the charged intellectual atmosphere of Central Europe between the wars.
When war threatened, Nemes, who was Jewish, fled Czechoslovakia via Helsinki, passing through Finland and Norway before reaching Sweden. He held his first Swedish solo exhibition in Stockholm in 1941 and became a Swedish citizen in 1948. In 1943 he co-founded the Minotaur group in Malmö alongside Max Walter Svanberg, C.O. Hultén, and Adja Yunkers -- a short-lived but historically significant node of Nordic Surrealism.
From 1947 to 1955 he served as director and chief innovator at Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, where he reshaped the curriculum and fostered a generation of Swedish modernists, including the circle around the Nya Valand group. His painting practice ranged from lyrical abstraction to figurative surrealism: harlequins, clocks, pyramids, and signs recur across oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, and aquatints. He was also a pioneer in Sweden in the use of enamel for monumental public commissions, including the facade of the municipal administration building in Alafors and the Zodiak Clock in Västertorp.
In 1965 Nemes received a Swedish State stipend and exhibited at the Drian Galleries in London. In 1980 he was awarded the Prince Eugen Medal, one of Sweden's highest honors in the arts, and in 1984 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg. A posthumous retrospective at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1990-1991 confirmed his place in the canon of Swedish modernism. His work is held by Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, and the Ferenc Martyn Museum in Pécs.
On Auctionet, Nemes appears across 32 lots spread among leading Swedish regional houses including Metropol, Crafoord, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Stockholms Auktionsverk. His prints and mixed-media works have sold for between 500 and 3,200 SEK, with top results for signed works such as 'Magnetiska fält' and 'Teckenspråk'. The auction record demonstrates consistent collector interest in his graphic output rather than major oils, which tend to appear at larger specialist sales.