The exhibition shows a cross-section of the oeuvre of Kossuth and Prima Primissima Award-winning painter Péter Földi. It focuses in particular on his works created after the turn of the millennium, but also offers an insight into the development of his characteristic style of painting. Péter Földi graduated in mathematics and art from the Teacher Training College of Eger, and after his studies returned to the village of his birth, Somoskőújfalu in Nógrád County, where he has lived and created ever since. He takes his inspiration from the day-to-day life of the village, the farms, gardens, pets and livestock or the local pubs, but this micro-environment is enlarged onto a cosmic, transcendental plane through his art. He populates his works with diverse human, animal and plant forms of life, painted using a system of vivid patches of colour, often drawing the scenes from an unusual perspective – such as from very high up, or perhaps from several viewpoints. His mini-dramas, with their generous helping of playfulness and irony, have much in common with the world of children’s drawings and folk art. The workaday events are sometimes given a fantastical or mythological horizon, but there is no point in searching for familiar scenes behind the pictures, as the narrative always remains individual and sovereign. Besides the oil paintings, Kunsthalle Budapest’s first retrospective exhibition of Péter Földi’s work also includes a selection of bronze statues.
curator: Zoltán Rockenbauer