Ilka Gedo was a Hungarian painter and graphic artist. She was known for her work series called Budapest ghetto, the Ganz Factory and Table Series.
Background
Ilka Gedo was born on May 26, 1912 in Budapest, Hungary. She was a daughter of Simon Gedő, a teacher in a Jewish grammar school, and Elza Weiszkopf, a clerk.
Ilka was raised in an artistic atmosphere due to multiple famous Hungarian authors and artists who were the family friends, as a painter Viktor Erdei.
Since her youth, Gedo created high mastery drawings even without taking painting lessons.
Education
Ilka Gedo began her education at the secondary school called Új Iskola (New School).
Finishing her secondary schooling, she was taught by three Jewish artists. They were Tibor Gallé at whose school Ilka entered in 1939, an impressionist and art nouveau style painter Victor Erdei and a sculptor István Örkényi Strasser. At the school of the latter she studied between 1942-1943. All of them were killed at the end of the War.
After her final exams at school, Ilka looked to pursue her artistic studies in Paris, but according to the Jewish laws of the World War II she couldn’t enter even the Hungarian Academy of Art.
Gedo continued her artistic training after the occupation at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts which she entered in the autumn of 1945 and had studied for six months only. Then, she became an apprentice of the Hungarian Bauhaus artist Gyula Pap.
Career
Ilka Gedo earned her living during the Second World War making ceramics, but she also continued to paint. So, from 1938 to 1947 the artist created a lot of pastel paintings depicting small provincial town Szentendre which gathered many artists by the time. This time, Gedo presented her paintings at two exhibitions, including Freedom and the People organized by the Group of Socialist Painters at the Centre of the Metal Workers' Union in 1942, and the fifth exhibition of OMIKE in 1943 (Hungarian Jewish Educational Association). She also started to work on her self-portraits series up to 1944 when in November, she was sent to the Budapest Ghetto.
While in ghetto, her Budapest ghetto series appeared. These drawings depicted the scenes of prisoners’ daily life.
After the liberation of Budapest on January 18, 1945, Ilka had a post in the research institute presided by a Hungarian scientist, Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Nobel Prize-winner. Gedo used as models her family, friends as well as herself continuing the series of self-portraits.
The search of new models lead the artist to the Ganz Machine Factory in 1947 which she visited regularly to create her sketches since then due to the permission of the Free Trade Union of Artists.
In 1949, Ilka Gedo gave up drawing almost for sixteen years mostly because of Communist dictatorship and the lack of recognition. During this period, the artist devoted herself to explore colour theory, in particular Goethe's Theory of Colours which she translated into Hungarian. Gedo as well wrote an essay on the art of a Hungarian painter Lajos Vajda.
The pause of Gedo’s artistic activity ended at the beginning of 1960s, when in 1962 three of her drawings were bought by the Hungarian National Gallery. Three years later, on 15 May took place Gedo’s first solo exhibition in the studio presented the creations of 1945 and 1948. This solo debut was followed by a group exhibition at the Galerie Lambert in Paris in 1969-1970:
The second solo exhibition of Ilka Gedo was organized in 1980 in the St. Stephen’s Museum of Székesfehérvár, Hungary. Two years later, the artist participated at her last show while alive at the Dorottya Gallery of Budapest.
"Ilka Gedő is one of the solitary masters of Hungarian art. She is bound to neither the avant-garde nor traditional trends. Her matchless creative method makes it impossible to compare her with other artists." István Hajdu
Connections
Ilka Gedo met her future husband, Endre Bíró, on the New Year's celebration of 1945. He was a chemistry student at the University of Szeged, Hungary.
They married the following year, and had two children. Their first son was born in 1947 and was named Dániel, the second one, named Dávid, was born six years later.