Ujházi Péter 2011 - 2011-09-21 — 2011-10-22 - Godot Galéria

Short listing

UJHÁZI PÉTER

Full exhibition text

Péter Ujházi

Opening: 2011 September 21 at 20 to 22

Viewable until October 22

Ujházi Péter’s life and more than three decades of artistic career are anchored in Székesfehérvár. In that town he was born in 1940, and returned there after completing the painting course at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1966. His painting, laced with irony and narrative, simultaneously writes a chronicle of history and everyday life. The distinct, multi‑view maps that he assembles for his works, from the middle of the seventies onward, almost inevitably led the artist into assemblage and the world of boxes, then in the following decade into collage‑based spatial paper works and fold‑out books, before in the next decade turning towards sculpture and producing a grotesque ceramic panorama. Despite his fundamentally narrative artistic temperament, Ujházi has always been drawn to landscape painting. The Nadap leaf‑image series is a local landscape diary that began in the final years of that era and continues to the present, with the tiny village of Nadap in the Velence Mountains as its constant location and source of inspiration.

Picture or foreground scene, heroic or banal Goodie's aftermath – Ujházi’s “cutting work” reveals the true faces of things, often poignant and miserable. Ujházi skilfully sinks, lingers, observes and tells, exactly as only he can, what only he sees – from Nadap to New York, from Budapest to Lisbon. Boxes, pyramids, official‑document graphics, paper cutouts – each a fragment of the world, like a stage spectacle where the characters play out something from our lives, and in that part the whole is always present. He stretches, turns and heights his images, placing them in a distinctive relational framework. This individual spatial concept suddenly ceases to fit within two dimensions; alongside painting the artist built boxes. Ujházi’s oeuvre can be divided into distinct periods, yet the various media or collective works remain constantly present, sometimes omitted, sometimes not. Examples are the boxes and the Nadap garden cycle.

www.artportal.hu

For the current exhibition the artist has brought his latest boxes.

to drive

Don't shoot!

Painted corn cobs

Who's from the swamp?

last year's main work,

Vomiting

and within the life work a new genre, the first pieces of still life.

Orchid

Autumn roses

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