- born in Budapest, Hungary in 1943
- immigrated to Montréal, Québec in 1982
- Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary; Academy of
Applied Arts, Budapest, Hungary
 click on thumbnails at left to view larger images
Gyula Kalko was an established commercial artist and
illustrator in Hungary prior to his immigration to Montréal in 1982. Thirteen at the time
of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Kalko walked the streets of Budapest, photographing
the destruction in the wake of military Soviet suppression. In the 1970s, Kalko began
accepting communist government commissions to produce posters. Less regulated than the
fine arts (i.e. painting), Kalko, like other progressive Hungarian artists in the 1960s
and 1970s, saw in graphic art, a medium that afforded the freedom to engage in implicit
forms of resistance against official communist doctrine. In 1982 Kalko left Hungary for
Poland, where the Solidarity movement was at its height but was expelled shortly after his
arrival because he was considered a potential dissident and Solidarity sympathizer. In
1992, Kalko began The Circle of History, a series of twenty oil paintings which
refer to various historical art works of different periods and identifies continuities
between events in contemporary society and history. One particular painting in this series
refers to Boris Yeltsin's efforts to bring about reforms which resulted in the siege of
the Russian Parliament by Communist troops. Kalko depicts Russian soldiers, in the same
manner in which Sumerian soldiers were depicted in the bas-relief relating the story of a
Sumerian ruler’s conquest of the city of Umma. Kalko merges historical narratives
with contemporary occurrences by drawing parallels between this event in Sumerian history
and the Communist resistance to the emerging democratic movement. In another painting in
this series, Kalko appropriates elements from Massacre of the Innocents by Guido
Reni, a painting relating the massacre of the children of Bethlehem by Herod's soldiers.
Kalko imparts his version with contemporary relevance, by depicting Serbian soldiers, an
allusion to war-torn Bosnia. Douglas Ord has commented: "The paintings
cross-reference the past and present via the human persistence to turn events into images,
and so make them less ephemeral. Kalko also sees a persistence of pattern in the events
themselves: hence the series' title -- Circle of History" (1997).
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