Retrospection

The 70th birthday stands distinct from all others as this event brings most of us to a halt to rethink our lives. I find coming from a small town of culture lucky indeed. The highly professional teachers of the local teacher training college helped me to find my own way. All that is important in my life became a part of me during these years. The themes of my sculptures were already offered by childhood experiences. As a teenager I already had an opinion about the world together with the desire to express myself. I could draw well and was instinctively attracted to modelling so I felt I had to go in this direction. I applied for the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Budapest where the sculptor József Somogyi taught me. I learnt first and foremost from him all that can be learnt about sculpture.

Penguins
Penguins(1972.)

I was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts after the school-leaving exam, which also meant that I could be called up for military service. I detested this unfamiliar atmosphere and to escape, I let go of the valid admission to the Academy and applied next year for the industrial designer field of the Academy of Applied Arts. This was a lucky turn as it meant two years of modern plastic arts studies as general training. Yet later I returned to the Academy of Fine Arts because of my strong attraction towards sculpture. After graduation I was offered a job as a teacher at the Teacher Training College in Nyíregyháza. I did not accept it as I did not feel it was my calling to become a teacher.

I have always been very proud of my introduction in the Exhibition Hall of the Institute of Cultural Relations in central Budapest in 1971. The Ministry of Culture bought one of my sculptures here. It meant that, for the first time in my life, I could
travel abroad, right to Japan, where the world actually opened to me. Meanwhile in Kecskemét the formerly promised studio had been built finally by 1973 and we have lived there with my wife, Ágnes Farkas since then. I was still a young sculptor when I had to face with art overengaged in politics: socialist realism still existent at the time, the avant-garde and also the contradictions and sometimes even the grotesque nature of Hungarian everyday life. I had to reflect on that, which – as a sculptor – I did with a series of works of the plastic arts. I made works for public places at times like fountains, sepulchres, busts and reliefs but my favourite is the creation of statuettes. 90 % of my works are made of bronze. It is an extraordinary metallic alloy which can preserve the freshness of works of a moment and still, it can bear hard forms if necessary.

Julia
Julia(1967.)

I also feel it important to tell that I dealt with galvanoplasty for a while and I have nearly twenty such works, mostly in the series that expresses my anxiety over nature. It makes lifelike and natural representation absolutely possible so I find its use justified where necessary because it can intensify the effect of a sculpture.

I have prepared about 600 pieces of art over the last fifty years, 250 of which is my own property. My style was renewed in approximately each decade. My first works were lyrical and created with a zest for life. They were followed by an expressive
series of plastic art works which reflected on the ever more hasty way of our world. Later I started to create more resolute and smooth bronze works, which began to simplify over the years. Recent times have brought with them more abstract and
definitive pieces. Today’s anti-artistic atmosphere gives me much involuntary free time, which I have used for inquiring into the nature of the horse, my “old love”.

Although my styles of the past years have changed from realism to abstraction, I have always wanted to stay comprehensible. In case my work has any virtues, it is due to the fact that I use no superficial means to achieve easy success but primary forms that evoke similar emotions in all of us.

An artist can express him- or herself through quite a number of authentic means of sculpture and if he owns them, he is able to produce an effect. The creation of a piece of sculpture is certainly justified by the fact that the work, embodied in space and forms, can evoke a more intensified effect on the viewer than a poem of even the most brilliant author expressing the same idea.

Art and sculpture within got considerable attention during most of my creative years. Culture has got into a vacuum as the state does not promote it any more and there is not even a wealthy middle class to support it instead. Any positive change can only be expected in one or two generations’ time. I really hope that my sculptures can still be loved then.