Kosice's Triumph in Paris

Two years ago, Gyula Kosice declared that his goal for the future was to present his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. That goal has now been triumphantly achieved.

The new installation of the Pompidou's permanent collection, titled "Multiple Modernities, 1905-1970," includes 1,000 works by nearly 400 artists from around the world. And one of the rooms of "Multiple Modernities" is dedicated to the work of Gyula Kosice.

Room 37 of the installation presents no less than 13 works by Kosice, as well as two others by members of the Madi movement he founded in 1946. The earliest of Kosice's works on display was made when he was just 20 years old; others were made throughout his 20s, and through the end of his 30s. The Pompidou exhibition is thus a tribute to two remarkable decades of creativity.

Kosice is a versatile conceptual innovator, and his career has been dedicated to making art from ideas without being constrained to working in any one genre or style. The works at the Pompidou witness the diversity of his materials over time -- paint, wood, bronze, steel, iron, neon, Plexiglas, water. In form, they share little except their beauty, their abstraction, and often their irregular, vaguely geometric forms.

Albert Einstein once declared that imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited, but "imagination encircles the world." Gyula Kosice clearly agrees. Like Einstein, Kosice has spent much of his time thinking about movement through space and time. Some of the paintings and sculptures in Room 37 float in space, like the visual equivalents of some new mathematical theorems; others appear to be poised for takeoff into the infinite. For the next year, art lovers unable to visit Buenos Aires can see the imagination of Gyula Kosice on display at France's great Musée National d'Art Moderne.