After completing secondary school, he taught himself to paint and then became in the 1970s an editor of the samizdat publication Családunk (Our Family), which brought frequent harassment by the police. In 1971 his father (the physician and nature healer Dr Andor Oláh) and his family were charged with conspiracy against the state and then ordered by the court to be kept under psychological observation and given treatment. Mátyás Oláh moved to Szentendre in 1980 and joined the Lajos Vajda Studio. He and his family emigrated to France in 1983, where he settled in Paris and lived on casual work. He returned to Hungary in 1993.