Foreword by Tibor Wehner

About the Sculptor Gusztáv Pálfy

Gusztáv Pálfy is almost in his 73rd year and so he has had a productive artist's career and has an extremely rich oeuvre. He has lived in Kecskemét since 1970 and has been an active participant of contemporary Hungarian art since the 1960-70s.

Mr Pálfy has had a long series of individual and team exhibitions. However, another rich chapter in his professional life is constituted of the great number of his monumental public works that he created for commission. Although because of their nature these sculptures are not fit for indoor exhibitions, they put his reliefs and statuettes into a special perspective.

Besides the great compositions reflecting the customers' expectations, the artist can freely express his unique programme of art through his statuettes, which are closer to humans and fit into the intimate dimensions of the inner space.

The Pálfy oeuvre is unbelievably consistent lacking greater changes and turns: his works have always been created in the spirit of the classic sculptural ideals. In the age of the 20th century's radical object formations Mr Pálfy's works keep the idea of traditional sculpture alive.

The finely modelled figures, because of their plastic forms, are full of generalized thoughts and meanings about the main human questions or they bear symbolic content through representing an attribute or an element.

Amidst these sculptures we can witness the battle between the sublime and the tragic, the lyrical and the dramatic, the harmonic and the beastly. By living the sculptures we can  waver between attraction and repulsion, identification and exclusion. In our broken and vague world when even the world of art and sculpture within are complicated, Mr Pálfy is trying to keep alive traditional and essential values, humanity and beauty through his works, which in itself counts today as a curious phenomenon.

Tibor Wehner
art historian