Inside an art dealer’s 430-square-foot apartment crammed with paintings
Janos Toth began collecting works by Inuk artist Floyd Kuptana last year. He now has 42 on display
Last April, art dealer Janos Toth came across an online auction for a painting depicting a white rabbit dancing toward abstract stripes of green, dark blue and gold. He immediately knew that he had found something unique—and undervalued.
The painting was by Floyd Kuptana, an Inuk artist from the Northwest Territories who moved to Toronto in the mid-1990s and became a fixture of the city’s art scene until his death in 2021. Toth put in a $4,000 bid and won it.
When it arrived, he hung it in his apartment, right next to his TV so that he could admire it while sitting on the couch. Now it’s surrounded by a plethora of other Kuptana paintings to create a wall-to-wall display. Since learning about the artist last year, Toth has acquired 41 more of his works. Anywhere you look in his apartment, there’s a Kuptana.
He refers to his 430-square-foot studio apartment at Broadview and Danforth as a “studioli”—a small room, often filled with artwork, dedicated to study and contemplation, which was popular among intellectuals in Italy during the Renaissance.
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Toth, 53, has spent much of his life in and around the art world. He was born in Budapest, where he went to university for art history. After he graduated, he opened an independent publishing house that printed greeting cards featuring Hungarian artists. A few years later, he closed up shop to pursue his lifelong dream of travelling the world.
In 2021, Toth settled in Toronto to work for a brokerage specializing in insuring fine art and jewellery. To honour his new home, he began collecting artwork of Canadian landscapes by Adrian Dingle, Henri Masson, Kenneth Gordon and Thomas Albert Stone. But, after encountering Kuptana’s painting, he became singularly obsessed.
He loves Kuptana’s paintings for their simplicity, their sharp colour contrasts and their striking compositions. Toth used his savings to buy every Kuptana painting he could get his hands on at auctions and art galleries. He even found a few paintings by tracking down people who had known the artist.
To date, Toth has acquired Kuptana paintings from ten different sources. He also has a single unfinished sculpture by the artist—a gift from a collector friend. The paintings cover the white walls of his studio, ranging from the size of a standard sheet of paper to that of a widescreen television. Bright colours predominate, as do recurring motifs of faces and animals, such as a two-headed wolf. On each is Kuptana’s iconic signature, “FKUPTANA.”
Toth has a new favourite painting every day. He’s fascinated by the portrait series, which depicts faces split in two vertically, half blue and half white. He also appreciates Kuptana’s sense of humour: Toth has a series of the artist’s Snoopy paintings, one of which depicts Snoopy lying on top of an igloo against a background reminiscent of Starry Night by Van Gogh, Kuptana’s own favourite artist.
As a collector, Toth would much rather have his paintings on display than squirrelled away in “a bunker in Switzerland,” he says. “I wake up with all these paintings and I go to sleep with these paintings.”
He has picked up subtle details about Kuptana’s use of colour and brush strokes, the way he draws eyes and the way he depicts a bear or wolf holding its paw. This intimate familiarity with Kuptana’s work has made Toth especially keen at spotting forgeries, which he says are on the rise as the artist gains prominence.
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Since he began his collection, Toth has befriended three other Kuptana obsessives: a Dutch librarian living in Switzerland, a Canadian collage artist who knew Kuptana personally and an Australian lawyer living in London, Ontario. Together, the quartet has made it their mission to protect the artist’s legacy.
On May 25, the fifth anniversary of the artist’s death, the group plans to hold an online panel about Kuptana’s art featuring three speakers. “He deserves to be known,” Toth says.
