Károly Antal

During his childhood, which he spent in Switzerland, Károly Antal became an enthusiastic mountaineer. Throughout his life Antal remained attached to the mountains – especially the Alps – where he hiked and climbed again and again.

Antal studied from 1925 first at a School of Arts and Crafts and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. From 1931 he worked as an assistant in the studio of Béla Ohmann (1890–1968), who significantly influenced the style of the neoclassical Roman School. Antal made study trips to Italy while on scholarship (1934/35), as well as to Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. From 1935 he lived and worked in an artists’ colony in Budapest. From 1950-59 he was a teacher in stone restoration at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Antal regularly participated in exhibitions from 1932 on. His favorite subject was the human figure with a preference for monumentality, including works for the Fisherman’s Bastion in Budapest. In his later sculptures the realistic and neoclassical tendencies prevailed, which allowed him to continue his career under the socialist regime. In 1945 he created the first Soviet heroic monuments.

Beginning in the 1950s, Antal was regularly commissioned to create sculptures for public spaces and to restore buildings. In the early 1970s, he went to the Kemenesalja region and produced more than 30 works for local villages. Antal was also the secretary of the Hungarian Workers’ Tourist Association. In the years before his death, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary and the Kossuth Prize. In 1952 in Helsinki he exhibited his plaster sculpture Ice Hockey Player.