Ujházi Péter

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An exhibition restored from the original WordPress archive of the Godot Gallery.

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New York – Yellow Line

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The Godot Gallery cordially invites you.

Péter Ujhazi

for the opening of the exhibition

2007 on October 31 at 20 o’clock.

Urban fragment

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Ujházi is at once clever and playful. An unconventional visual artist. At least, if we view his career and works through the preconceptions that people skilfully tinker in primary school, win a national student contest, are admitted to the Junior Academy, then get loose, “let themselves go”, and – as the case may be – become a serious lad, are taken on by the Academy of Fine Arts, finish it, and without inspiration, after a handful of scholarships and commissions, descend into madness until their burial, Ujházi fits the picture.

Peter Ujházi is not that sort.

I’ll go back to the sentence that opens the paragraph. So: U.P. is clever. He truly is. I’m not trying to say he’s a clever painter or a box‑maker. He is, but that’s partly a private matter and partly the job of art historians to dissect it. I’m not even suggesting that he has the domain‑specific acumen – that he hasn’t been knocked off his head, that he isn’t a fool, that he figures out what he needs, that he knows what it takes to hold a fly, that he’s a good artist and a big rogue, that he knows the little portals, the enormous value of connections, and that he’s included in all good stuff. No coincidence – he became a little rooster on the rubbish heap in Székesfehérvár. I repeat: I didn’t mean it that way.

Gas Street

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Ujházi Péter feeds on the world of his clever, bright mind. With astonishing precision he notices—and feels—when a problem, a mystery or a phenomenon is about what it concerns, what its essence is, and what its driving elements are. Alongside this he is also cultivated. He did not acquire it by the book‑worm or dusty boy, girl, master and lady method of libraries, but instinctively, guided from within, he made those written experiences, methods, data his own, and through them—not only as a consumer but by using them—he fulfils his world: his life, many of his visions. His knowledge and cultivation did not grow according to the spiritual wealth of systematising types of people, but in a spontaneous manner just as unregulated as everything that begins with his painting that we receive from him.

This is also a consequence of the fact that Ujházi Péter is playful.

When someone browses through what seems to be a lazy composition and even finds delight in it, they rarely notice that a painter with extraordinary intellectual curiosity is playing with them. Not only because the artist fills his buildings and paintings with all sorts of textual applications, so that his audiences giggle politely as soon as they see them, but also because, after mocking himself, he only then starts to delve into the meanings of the text fragments he has gathered from various sources, which, though in playful forms, become the fundamental building blocks of the works. From folk kitchen wall‑decorators’ slag to the medieval wisdoms known only to aloof literary scholars, every kind of written text interests him. He even places them in his works: he pronounces the inevitable articulate expressions briefly and authentically, so that he has more time and energy left to create the surroundings of the appearing sentences.” – Antal István

Are you there?

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The exhibition is open until November 24, from Tuesday to Friday 10 to 18, and on Saturday between 10 and 13 o’clock.

Our special supporter this month: www.takoo.hu

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