László LAKNER

(1936, Budapest) painter

He studied painting at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts between 1954 and 1960. He went on a study trip to Italy from 1963 to 1964 and spent a month in West Germany and Switzerland in 1968 with the scholarship he won from the Folkwang Museum in Essen. He received a DAAD scholarship in 1974. He has been living in Germany since 1974. He won the German Critics’ Award in 1977, the Kossuth Prize in 1998 and the Prima Award in 2014, while he was bestowed with the title Artist of the Nation in 2022. Since the 1960s, he has been a regular participant at exhibitions in Germany, Austria and Poland and in recent decades also in Hungary. He took part in the Iparterv exhibitions in 1968 and 1969. He exhibited his works at the Documenta in Kassel in 1977 as well as at the Venice Biennials of 1972, 1976 and 1990. The Ludwig Museum in Budapest organised a retrospective exhibition of his oeuvre in 2004.