“I know that art can change lives – it changed mine – and I hope that art can change the world.” (Vincent Namatjira)
István Kulinyi was born in 1945 and studied at the College of Applied Arts, which at the time was much more liberal-minded than the Fine Arts, from 1968 to 1973. His education, which was closer to the Bauhaus spirit, gave him the opportunity to develop a comprehensive, universal interpretation of his wide-ranging artistic creativity, which throughout his career made him a versatile and experimental artist, sensitive to and reflecting on world phenomena, aware of problems and seeking solutions.
The focus of his exhibition is on his autonomous artistic creations, which at the same time reflect the experience and richness of his entire graphic and design technique. Reflecting on the social and existential phenomena of the last 4-5 years, the material on display includes quasi-diary works, paintings, digital works, photographs, video-moramas and poems, as well as earlier works from the oeuvre, placed in dialogue with their contemporary successors.
His works are often digitally and manually painted panels, mixing formal elements of figurative, lyrical abstraction and expressive gesture painting. He usually thinks in cycles, believing in variation as a method of creative thinking, in the problem-solving power of repeating the essence in new forms, arrangements and other means.
Highlights of his career include games, professional books, graphic and architectural designs, such as the huge steel heads in front of the former Pannon GSM building or the mural design for the facade of the Museum of Architecture. His work includes a series of illustrations for the Kempinski hotel chain and the poster for the Liszt Centenary in 1986. In 1994 he was awarded the Munkácsy Prize, in 2020 he was made a Meritorious Artist of Hungary, and in 2006 he won the MAOE Lifetime Achievement Award.
In addition to his work as a designer, he has also taken on public artistic and social tasks for the betterment of the community, such as founding Artplay, a creative community for the development of creativity-forming visual art games, or the Hungarian Design Cultural Foundation, which has a broader programme, while his daily, ongoing autonomous and experimental artistic activity also includes the representation of reality through photography, video or lyrics, often as a written projection of his images.
Kulinyi has always been concerned with the why and the impact of dramatic events that have a decisive influence on the world. The factor that shapes events from individual moral human choices into fate and phenomena that benefit or destroy humanity. In his youth, the moon landing of 1969, later the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001, and in recent years, the Covid epidemic, the climate crisis and war.
The material of his recent jubilee exhibition at the Kunsthalle presents him as a highly sensitive sensor of a worsening reality, an unrelenting seismographer whose visual, life-affirming images speak of hope that keeps on giving, always with unbroken faith.