Exhibitions

NARROW FIELD – COMING AND GOING – FROM RIGHT TO LEFT –

UP AND DOWN

Béla Losonczi was born in Târgu Mures in 1974. He spent his childhood years in Nyárádszentlászló. Already then, he was drawing and painting with great enthusiasm and talent, and this passion

remained even after the family’s resettlement in Hungary in 1982. He was admitted to the Secondary School of Fine Arts and Applied Arts in Budapest, and from 2003 he could continue his studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where his master was, among others, Ferenc Kis-Tóth painter. Before graduation, he had a stroke in 2009. It seemed that his promising career would be ended by his tragic illness, but this did not happen: with a strong will – to replace his paralysed right hand – he learned to draw and paint with his left hand. Although he walks with a cane and his ability to speak and his vocabulary are only a fraction of what they used to be, he has not lost his special spiritual sensitivity, his deep emotional richness, his artistic skill of expression and composition, his fine sense of colour, his imagination, which bursts to the surface with elemental force and creative instinct, using quite strange and surprising pictorial ideas, recurring visual themes and motifs, ingenious combinations of materials, unusual combinations of objects. In the genre, medical, existential and dramatic sense of the word, Béla Losonczi has become an art brut artist par excellence. An artist whose bizarre bloom and lush rawness, whose inimitable uniqueness, naïve charm and bewildering magic are attested by the abundant flow of his works. Tihamér Novotny art writer

photos by István Lantos