Executed in 1968, Imre Bak’s painting Stripes III. (Sávok III.) stands as one of the earliest and finest examples of Eastern European hard-edge painting. Stunningly beautiful in both composition and choice of colour, Bak’s painting represents a radical break from his previous practice, rooted in tachism and the style of the École de Paris. With its intensely hued surface, Stripes III. makes reference to the style of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. Having only travelled for the first time in his life to West Germany in the mid-1960s, Bak was astonished by the changes taking place in the international art world. Living under the repressive conditions of socialist Hungary, Bak had very limited access to recent artistic advances in the West. “It was in 1965 that I came into contact with a progressive German gallery in Stuttgart that exhibited (…) artists such as Frank Stella, Morris Louis, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and others. My striped paintings that I painted afterwards show their influence. But if someone has seen a Frank Stella, and then compares it to my painting, they can detect some very important differences – this was conscious on our part: we tried to follow international trends, but we did not want to simply copy the practices of others. We added personal and local factors, giving real meaning and importance to what we were doing.” (Nóra Winkler, A Conversation with Imre Bak, Artmagazin Online, 2016). After visiting the ground-breaking 1968 Documenta in Kassel, Bak realised that there was no way back to the soft abstraction of the 1950s. Although nonfigurative art in Hungary was practically blacklisted by the state, Bak decided to create artworks under the aegis of American minimalism. Only 29 years old at the time, Bak quickly turned into a leading figure amongst his peers, becoming a significant member of the group of neo-avant-garde artists. Along with Ilona Keserü, István Nádler and Endre Tót, to name a few, Bak participated in the short-lived but legendary IPARTERV I-II. exhibitions in Budapest, displaying a never-before-seen concentration of pure forms and sublime colours in 1968-69. Switching from the previously used oil paint to acrylic, Bak managed to achieve a vibrant intensity of colour, culminating in the creation of magnificent colour fields. By carefully choosing secondary colours, such as light purple or magenta, orange and green, with the only addition of the primary colour of blue, Bak presents in Stripes III. a masterfully composed painting, with crisp regularity and strict but distorted symmetry. His ability to manipulate scale and the interrelationship of strong colours, while leaving the centre of the painting seemingly untouched, painted in white, imbues the painting with structural rhythm and spatial tension. Offered now for the first time at auction, Stripes III. is an outstanding example of Imre Bak’s early works, showcasing his hallmark technique and uncompromising ethos towards the developments of contemporary art. A wonderful pair of Stripes paintings can be found in the permanent collection of the Ludwig Museum, Budapest (Stripes I, 1968). Imre Bak has exhibited widely in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, and the USA since 1966. His works are in numerous public collections, including Tate Modern, London; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; and the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Bálint Ferenczy