Szemadám

The two pillars of György Szemadám’s artistic attitude are his intensive relationships with organic phenomena – natural habitats, nature and in particular birds – and time.

His attitude to the past is rooted in collective memory – past events and the universal lessons of artistic processes – and leads to the creation of subjective imprints of personal experiences, events and spaces of history, historical events, art history and universal heritage.

Present on the exhibition scene since 1969, Gyürgy Szemadám went on to become one of the leading personalities of self-made young avant-garde artists who organised themselves into a group. In the first half of the 1970s he contributed to, and organised, numerous happenings and performances.

From the latter half of the 1980s his means of expression classicised, it became figurative and his method became characterised by abundant and meticulous detail, powerful contours, while drawing on the themes of his earlier works. Specific ideas become objectified in his works in the interconnections of painterly signs, and these ideas are elaborately developed; now focusing on technical issues, now on human issues.

György Szemadám had wanted to be an ornithologist and from the very outset the most characteristic themes of his works include birds. His birds are mediums: intellectual passages and messengers of spiritual gateways. They open up, and abolish, the limits between mundane and transcendental, profane and sacred, worldly and otherworldly, earthly and divine, finite and infinite, and freedom and confinement. The mediatory character of his art is highlighted by the fact that the frames have increasingly become an intrinsic part of the works.

In his art György Szemadám travels immense distances in space and time. He wanders with abandon in real or imaginary landscapes. Most often he soars with the birds, between hazy times past and future eras, in strange lands and at home, vanquishing the bounds of space and time. Eventually, seeking the birds and finding himself, he always finds the way home.