László Lakner
László Lakner (born April 15, 1936 in Budapest) is a Hungarian-German painter, sculptor and conceptual artist. He lives and works in Berlin, in the Charlottenburg district. He is the father of the Hungarian artist Antal Lakner (born 1966).
He grew up in Budapest. His father was an architect who shared his name, and his mother was Sára Lakner. Lakner trained at the Art Gymnasium in Budapest and then studied painting with Aurél Bernáth at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts from 1954 to 1960. In 1959 he began making works based on found photographs.
Lakner began traveling to Western countries in the 1960s. He visited Germany and Italy, and in 1968 he received a scholarship from Museum Folkwang. In 1974 he moved to Berlin with a DAAD scholarship and decided to live in Germany. He has been shown at major events, including the Venice Biennale (participating in 1972, 1976 and 1990) and Documenta in Kassel (1977). He won several prizes, such as the Bremen “Art Prize of Böttcherstraße” (1976) and the German Critics’ Prize (1977). In 1998 he received Hungary’s Kossuth Prize, a top national award. In 2000 his self-portrait was added to the collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Lakner has worked as a teacher as well as an artist. He taught painting at the Essen University of Applied Sciences starting in 1979, and he lectured at the Free University of Berlin. In 1982 he became a professor of experimental design at the University of Essen, a position he held until his retirement in 2001. He later settled permanently in Berlin.
His art shows great variety and is mostly driven by ideas. He moves easily among painting, photography, text, film, objects and sculpture. He often reshapes books and texts into art, or uses written language as a central subject. He has created works that mix realism with conceptual ideas, such as photographs turned into paintings, book objects, and symbolic images like heads and skulls to suggest themes of life and death.
Key themes in his work include language, literature and the act of writing. He has also explored the relationship between different art forms by transforming sources from philosophy and poetry into new art. Notable projects include turning a book by the philosopher Georg Lukács into a work of art, and self-portraits that carry strong political statements about the artist’s position under a repressive regime. His later work blended photography, large-scale images, and even references to Asian calligraphy, often reinterpreting such sources in a Western context. One famous piece is the MAO BIBLE, a reimagined Little Red Book bound with ropes.
Lakner’s long career also includes many exhibitions and public works. He has continued to experiment with different media and ideas, always seeking new ways to connect art with language, history and society.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 03:37 (CET).