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Hungarian Artist

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Gábor Városi (born 10 December 1965) is a contemporary Hungarian painter, sculptor, photographer and building designer. He is the creator of the Poet’s Garden Villa Park and Gallery, a residential complex and avant-garde, habitable sculpture built around a statue park, a zen garden and an exhibition space. He is a student of Victor Vasarely, Ignác Kokas, Gábor Dienes and Zoltán Tölg-Molnár.

He is known for his monumental, kinetic, glass sculptures with varying lighting, abstract expressionist paintings, atavistic glass masks and unique buildings.

His activities centre around efforts to integrate works of art into the buildings of major real estate investments using 1% of their budget, with a view to promoting art and artists. Another key theme of his work involves exploring ways to reduce the distance between people and art, making art a part of everyday life.

His most recent work includes experimenting with the connection of physical paintings with blockchains and virtual reality. Traditional panel paintings complemented with monitors allow for a slow metamorphosis, hiding messages that are also incorporated into the virtual space as NFTs.

Early life and training

Gábor Városi was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a military officer father and journalist mother. Displaying a talent for fine art, he studied to become an artist from high school. From 1980 to 1984 he attended the Secondary School of Visual Arts as a student of artists Zoltán Tölg-Molnár and István Gábor, architect György László Sáros, literary aestheticians Zsuzsa Pál and Ágnes Ék, and professor of history Dr. Péter Kőszeghy. As a student he won several competitions and awards, including the Domanovszky Award and the March 15 Concept Award. He graduated top of his class. In 1984 he was discharged from the Hungarian Army after four months of military service, and so until he began college the so-called ‘Transylvania Tour‘ took place, in which together with Attila Jászberényi he smuggled medicine and Bibles into the Hungarian-inhabited areas of Romania. He continued his studies from 1985 to 1989 at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Department of Painting. He was the student of the masters Ignác Kokas, and later Gábor Dienes. In 1987, he was invited by Layota Art AB to paint in Sweden, and exhibited his work in Stockholm. He presented his first ever solo exhibition in the fall of 1987, in La Galerie de La Rochefoucauld in Paris. His mentor and master Victor Vasarely gave the opening speech at the exhibition. The material later won first prize in a contest at the Musée Modern Museum in Brussels. In 1992, he completed the three-year Master’s course at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts with distinction, while at the same time he graduated from the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University, majoring in Philosophy and Sociology.

Painting

Early work:

In the second half of the 1980s, Városi’s painting moved towards abstraction, using tachisme, stain painting and action painting, simultaneously combining geometric forms with lyrical elements. These lyrical abstract paintings using mixed techniques attracted the attention of Victor Vasarely, the world-famous father of op-art, who invited the young painter to become his student. After a scholarship in Sweden, he made his debut in Paris in a highly successful solo exhibition opened by Vasarely. In the decade following the retirement of the old master, Városi turned increasingly towards the abstract encaustic technique. After a trip to Brazil at the turn of the millennium, he began to digitally manipulate his travel photographs, which he had taken with artistic intent, and then complemented the prints with traditional painting tools, paint and gestures. He calls the resulting large-scale, colored, glazed portraits ‘soul paintings’.

In 2019 Városi returned to art following an almost twenty-year hiatus. Then, during the lockdown imposed as a result of the pandemic, he began creating new, abstract, expressionist works. The paintings created using his new technique, which are layered and partially three-dimensional, are “artworks based on psychic automatism, but in the spirit of new Pop Art – which are manually painted and printed, and also partly created digitally”. Traditional panel paintings – partially three-dimensional works based on layers – are experimentally complemented with monitors on which a slow metamorphosis takes place, which are then also represented as NFTs in virtual space.

Exhibitions:

Group exhibitions: “Plein Air” and “Water”, at the latter of which he won first prize.
In autumn 1987, his first solo exhibition was held in Paris, at La Galerie de La Rochefoucauld. His mentor and master, Victor Vasarely gave the opening speech to the exhibition.
In November 1988, an exhibition at La Galerie d’Art Internationale, Paris.
In April 1989, an exhibition in Budapest, in the Barcsay Hall.
1990, exhibition in Bochum, Germany
1991 exhibition in Karlsruhe
1992 Budapest, Duna Gallery, solo exhibition
1996 Budapest, Pesterzsébet Museum, solo exhibition
2002 Szentendre and Budapest, Barabás Villa Gallery
2004 Budapest, Lurdy Gallery

After the 2004 exhibition, he took a break from painting for almost two decades, then returned during the Covid 19 period by paintings in memory of loved ones he had lost.

2022 Budapest, Poet’s Garden Villa Park and Gallery, solo exhibition titled Multisensory journey
2022 Art Market Budapest, VIP Lounge – Focus on the glass sculptures of Városi
2022 Art Market Budapest, Erdész Gallery & Design exhibited his abstract expressionist paintings.

Photography

1985 - to present

Városi has visited more than 90 countries. He photographed his travels using the best analogue and digital techniques available, creating portraits and landscapes. His 1980s Practica camera was followed a decade later by Hasselblad’s Xpan, and later, when analogue cameras were phased out, the camera of choice became the lens of the current best phone. As Warhol said about Polaroid: “It’s not the technique, it’s the composition that matters.”

Other Artistic Endeavours

Városi’s work outside painting can be divided into three main directions:

1. Buildings, “Habitable sculptures”:

These are designed as sculptures that also function as high-end apartments, created around/near Városi’s sculptures and paintings made with co-creators – architects, interior designers, landscapers, contractors and investors. The buildings in their entirety, with their carefully placed artistic details and the artworks, are designed to evoke emotions in residents and visitors, which are consciously composed into a coherent experience for the viewer. The technocratic approach of the West is softened by the philosophical tranquillity of the East in the form of zen plant islands, water surfaces and garden areas. His forerunners in this field include the Austrian Friedensreich Hundertwasser and the Catalan Antoni Gaudí, who also used techniques to blur the dividing line between exterior and interior spaces, while the plants that symbolize nature and are an integral part of the composition often continue into the living spaces.

1992 Construction of the first “Sculpture House” – followed by twenty more. 2004 Shambala Home 2010 Art Home 2016 Invitation to the competition for the design of the Budapest Museum of Ethnography, for which designs were created by Szabolcs Nagy-Miticzky, Ádám Vesztergom, Lajos Hartvig, Béla Bánáti, and László Lelkes. 2022 Poet’s Garden Villa Park and Gallery

2. Kinetic glass sculptures

Monumental, moving glass sculptures with varying internal lighting. The rotation and varying color and intensity of these unique, kinetic, multi-ton works of art are controlled by artificial intelligence, adapting to the lightshow projected onto the surrounding gardens and buildings. They perceive and react to the viewer. They comprise a homage to the works of Nicholas Schöffer and Jean Tinguely.

3. Bent glass masks, totems:

“Primitive and ancient”, these are works that allow the hardening glass to have its own will. When first made, it is impossible to calculate when and how the stiffening, cooling material will crack or break – so the outcome is never the mask originally planned. This unpredictability is precisely the point, and was inspired by Matisse and Picasso’s experimentation with African and Alaskan tribal masks, which challenged contemporary conceptions of art.

Video game development

In 2000, together with Zsolt Kígyóssy, he founded Zen Studios, a game software development company. In 2015, the company won the prestigious award from the US games rating agency Metacritic, widely considered the ‘Oscars’ in game development, ahead of Warner Bros, Sony and Capcom. The company was acquired by the Swedish Embracer Group in 2020.

Literary works

2022 Journalist Tamás Nagy and Munkácsy Award-winning graphic artist László Lelkes wrote a book summarizing the oeuvre of Gábor Városi. The 350-page publication was presented as part of a new exhibition of abstract expressionist paintings and kinetic sculptures in the newly built Poet’s Garden Villa Park and Gallery on 5 October 2022.

NFT, Metaverse, Crypto (2022-)

In 2018, with the growing popularity of the term ‘web3’, many saw a new and unique opportunity, and from the second half of 2022, that promise bore fruit for many. However, for Városi, the chief interest in NFTs lay in their ability to render works of art in the digital space unique and unrepeatable, just as paintings and sculptures are in physical reality. And, having created such digital works, blockchain promised to be the best way to get them to the user. His buildings, paintings and sculptures exist in reality, but for that very reason they are limited by geographical distance from a larger potential audience. In a digital metaverse, by contrast, the whole world potentially has access to an artist’s creations.

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Revision as of 08:40, 20 March 2024 editTs227 (talk \| contribs)4 edits -- Draft creation using the WP:Article wizard --Tag: Possible self promotion in user or draftspace		Revision as of 08:45, 20 March 2024 edit undoTs227 (talk \| contribs)4 edits Submitting using AfC-submit-wizard Next edit →
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