Atila Biro - Etching, untitled.

Attila Bíró left Budapest with his family, whose father was an architect, at the end of World War II, before the arrival of the Red Army (1944) and settled for some time in Austria, then in 1947 in Saarbrücken, then under the French protectorate. The young Attila continued his studies at the French Lycée in this city and then, with the intention of becoming a painter, went to Paris where in 1951 he began his architectural studies at the Paris School of Fine Arts (Pingusson-atelier). In 1953, however, he entered the Stuttgart Technical College, where he took lessons from the architect Günter Behnisch. At the same time he took painting lessons from Willi Baumeister. He also belonged to the philosophical and aesthetic circles around Max Bense, and finally attended the art history seminars of Hans Wentzel. Thanks to his friendship with Georg Karl Pfahler, he participated in the foundation of the “Group of Eleven”, which also included Friedrich Sieber and Günther Kirchberger. The group's first exhibition took place in 1957 at Galerie 17 in Munich. It was soon followed by others in London (New Vision Centre Gallery), Brussels (Galerie Les Contemporains), Rome (Galleria La Tartaruga) and again in London (Drian Gallery). Attila Bíró completed his studies in Stuttgart in 1958 with a degree in engineering and architecture. He then moved to Paris and worked in various architectural firms until he was able to make a living from his painting and devote himself to it. It was through the meeting in 1959 of the American painters of informal abstraction Paul Jenkins and Sam Francis that he found the path that would remain his own, that of a free figuration structured by the chromatism of the rainbow. It was then that he adopted the stage name Atila, or Atila Biro, his pseudonym therefore consisting of simply removing the second letter "t" from his first name. With his wife Lila Lakshmanan (married in 1963), a film professional (we owe him the editing of films by Jean-Luc Godard such as Le Contempt and Les Carabiniers , by François Truffaut such as La Peau Douce ), he divides his working time between his studio in Nanterre and the edge of the lake of Saint-Cassien (Var), the artist finding in this second place the working conditions most suited to his watercolour technique (pre-moistening the paper, drying the works in the sun). Annotations on the back of watercolours show that he liked to seek inspiration as far away as Italy. Atila and Lila also made a trip to Morocco , several others to Northern India . Atila was also interested in lithography and etching; the number of copper engravings he made in Nanterre has been estimated at about a hundred works, divided into two essential periods, 1964-1965 and 1980-1981. He exhibited his works in solo exhibitions in Paris, Rotterdam, Zurich, Stuttgart, Brussels, Gothenburg and Amsterdam, etc. In 1970 he obtained French nationality. From 1958 to 1973 he participated in projects for the business district La Défense near Paris. About twenty museums (see below) have acquired his works. He died on March 22, 1987