(1958 -2008) Györgydeák György was born in 1958 in Székesfehérvár. He graduated from high school in Veszprém and lived in Balatonkenese. He worked as a graphic artist at the Bakonyi Museum in Veszprém for ten years, from 1991 to 2000 he was the art editor of the magazine Cigányfúró, and for several years he worked at the House of Arts Veszprém.
He was self-taught in art, working in several genres (graphics, painting, object, plane plastic, applied graphics) in parallel. He continued to think about each discovery, each idea giving rise to further ideas freely crossing the boundaries of genres. Close to him are the processes of grotesque and junk art, the abstract representations of humans and animals in prehistoric art and the world of children's drawings. His art can also be interpreted in terms of individual mythologies. The language of his work is loosely coded, open-ended, drifting and manipulative, governed by the laws of instinct and ideation.
He has been exhibited in dozens of exhibitions throughout the county and beyond, and his drawings and prints have been regularly published in weekly and monthly magazines. Since 1989 he has been a member of the Veszprém Artists' Guild.
His works have been awarded several times with the Award of Excellence. A great success in the last period of his life was the establishment of an international artists' collective, held alternately in Hungary, Finland and Transylvania.
His works, like his whole life, were imbued with humour and a sense of adventure. His works, like his whole life, are connected to Lake Balaton and nature. Györgydeák is made of scrap wood, string, tow, nails, sand, plaster, clay, pieces of old utensils, disintegrating textiles, furniture fragments, broken toys of his children. ... and we could go on and on with the things he used to make his Bübüs and most of his tableaux, in short, everything that we used and threw away to serve his imagination. To tell the story of his private mythology, the artist invented a genre of his own: the Bübü. Bübü, a category invented by the artist, is the name given to his bewilderingly odd, charmingly bumfordian sculptures or puppets. Most of them are more reminiscent of animals or some bird-like creatures - but some are more human-like. But they are mostly mythological creatures, such as the artist's character Lauz or the poetic Eototo and Aholi, the good spirits of the Indians, but they also resemble the idols of any natural people or the deities of prehistoric times. Györgydeák's relationship with his family and ancestors is expressed in his plane sculptures in a frank and revealing way. In addition to his idiosyncratic, grotesque collages and asamblazas, he made his mark in the genre of contemporary printmaking with his strongly contoured ink drawings, his sack men and his animal figures created in his own evolution. His book illustrations follow the evolution of his ink drawings, preserving the exuberance, playfulness and emotional, surrealistic qualities of his prints.
At the end of his life he returns to his beginnings, his childhood dream of going to the Sahara and he studied the rock paintings of Tassil as a child with awe. The Sahara is a fragment of a biography that has a profound influence on his entire oeuvre and his late works have a direct impact on the expedition.
Györgydeák, an artist from Balatonkenese, would have turned 60 in 2018. The exhibition presents a selection from 30 years of his work.
