Gallery

The Halas Gallery is the public art collection of Kiskunhalas. It contains around 2,000 different items of fine art and photographs. The Gallery was registered as a museum in 2000. The main display space of the collection is the Végh House, which features a permanent exhibition of the paintings Balázs Diószegi, a winner of Hungary’s Munkácsy Prize. The other main feature of the Halas Gallery is the bequest of artist Viola Berki – oil paintings, etchings and prints, which can be seen in the House of Collections. Further valuable material includes the 1930s sociography photographs of Vince Lakatos. The Halas Gallery also regularly collects and exhibits the works of contemporary local artists.

Some of the Artists from, or connected with Kiskunhalas
(This list is not definitive!)

József Baráth (1929, Bratislava) Grammar school Art teacher, painter.
Since the late 1960s Baráth has preserved characteristic scenes from local life and natural motifs in his aquarelle and oil paintings. From the 1980s his work departs from the depiction of realistic images towards the direction of decorative stylization. Today his art is characterized by a continuous experimentation with new techniques and materials. His transparent world of forms has been typified by simple, ‘easily-read’ symbolic motifs and decoration in recent decades. He has approached abstraction of form in more than one of his works.

Károly Barth (1939, Budapest) and Ilona Bart Mezőfi Mózer (1938, Kiskunhalas) A married couple who sculpt, paint, and restore pictures.
Presently they live in Kronberg, Germany, but they frequently travel home to Kiskunhalas. Many of their works decorate our town, for example their joint life-size bronze statue, The Lacemakers (1994). Károly Barth’s works include Well of the Ravens (1993), a bronze statue in the town’s main square, and a relief portrait of László Nagy Czirok (2003) to be found on the outer wall of the Thorma János Museum. Ilona Mózer is responsible the bust of János Thorma (1992). The couple is presently working on a large-scale sculpture representing Halas Lace, which will be erected in the town’s main square. A catalogue of their work was published by the Thorma Museum in 2003.

Viola Berki (1932, Kiskunhalas – 2001, Budapest) Munkácsy Prize winning painter.
Her pictures marry the Gothic and Renaissance with the story telling methods of folk tales and ballads. Her characteristic anecdotal interpretation and minute method of depiction can be identified in her oil paintings, her copper engravings and her pencil drawings alike. She has created several large wall mosaics. In the Registry Office of the Kiskunhalas Town Hall there is her version of the Hungarian story ‘Helen the Beauty’ with a panorama of the characteristic buildings of her home town as a background. She presented more than one hundred of her works to the town in 1999 and these can be viewed in a permanent exhibition in the House of Collections.

Miklós Bodor (1925, Nagykörű) Art teacher, graphic artist.
Bodor has been exhibiting regularly for forty years. He developed his individual graphic style from the beginning of the 1970s, based on clean and concise contours and shade-free representation. He has preserved the flora and fauna of the Sandhills region between the rivers Danube and Tisza in thousands of drawings. He has airy pictures with delicate lines that blend characteristic buildings, churches and statues of local settlements with flowers to form a vision-like surrealist montage. After decades of graphic work he has created an artistic topography of the Sandhills, which was published in book form by the Thorma János Museum in 2001.

Mária Bródi (1949, Kiskunhalas) Window dresser, interior decorator, graphic artist, lace designer.
Her individual drawing style is developed out of the ornamental floral decorations of the folk art of blue-dyeing. Common themes in her pictures include conception, birth and death, but also the temperamental changes of the sensitive female spirit. Bródi illustrated Edit Jak’s story book, ‘Goldcap’, and has also produced countless drawings for children. Many of her lace designs have been sewn in the last decade, the forms of which have contributed to the renewal of Halas lace.

Balázs Diószegi (1914, Kunszentmiklós – 1999, Kiskunhalas) Art teacher, Munkácsy Prize winning painter.
After finishing the College of Fine Arts, Diószegi taught in Szentendre, Debrecen, Miskolc and the Teacher Training College of Nyíregyháza. He moved to Kiskunhalas in 1957, where he was a definitive figure on the arts scene until his death. He termed himself “the last Hungarian peasant artist”. His oil paintings with their dual figures and dramatically dense, deep toned colours as well as his free and dynamic brushstrokes represent a unique approach in Hungarian painting. As opposed to the traditional landscapes of the Hungarian Plains school, Diószegi’s pictures are expressive slices of peasant life. His quick-fire graphics of a handful of lines significantly differ from his works in oil. These mainly preserve the vanishing moments of the life of a small town.

Terézia Dunay (1954, Baja) Naive painter and sculptor.
Dunay started painting in 1980 when, under the influence of her mentor, Balázs Diószegi, she moved to Kiskunhalas. The majority of her pastel and oil pictures have religious themes, but she also paints landscapes and subject pictures. She has featured in several national amateur exhibitions and her works are on display in the Museum of Naive Artists in Kecskemét.

János Ferincz (1949, Csörnyeföld) Oil industry technician, press and urban photographer.
In the beginning Ferincz photographed the hard everyday life of his workmates. From the mid-80s he has been producing increasingly diverse documentary photos. His dramatic series showing the lives of those in the oil industry and his pictures of the buildings, squares and streets of Halas are particularly noteworthy. For each of the last fifteen years a calendar featuring his photographs has been published.

Márta Jakabfi (1959, Kecskemét) Art teacher, enamel artist.
In her childhood she won a Nehru Medal for her batik work. Her pupils now follow in her footsteps and enjoy rare success in children’s drawing competitions. As an exhibiting artist Jakabfi has been creating enamels for almost ten years. Her favoured motifs are flowers and birds.

Gábor Kollarics (1967, Budapest) Grammar school Art teacher, artist working in a variety of visual media.
Kollarics’s work is montage-based. It explores the possibilities for the creation of meaning from variations of pictorial and formal elements.

Dr. László Körmendy (1951, Szeged) Ear, nose and throat specialist, amateur icon painter.
Körmendy was originally inspired to master this “archaic trend in religious painting” by the icon workshops of Greek monasteries. Another significant influence on his work was the style of the Russians Andrej Rubljov and Feofan Grek. Körmendy’s pictures are no slavish copies, however, but independent works following the stylistic and thematic traditions of icon painting.

Vince Lakatos (1907, Mikelaka – 1978, Budapest) Sociographic photographer, film director.
From the early 1930s Lakatos worked as a journalist in Kiskunhalas for almost a decade. It was during this period that he wrote his reports revealing the lives of the peasant underclass and took accompanying photographs. These were mostly published in journals from the Hungarian capital. Lakatos is one of the most important figures in 1930s Hungarian pictorial sociography. His photographs are irreplaceable documents of the life of contemporary Kiskunhalas peasants.

Kálmán Lázár Mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, amateur artist.
Lázár is one of the most multi-faceted and modernist artists of Kiskunhalas. He employs detritus to create art objects using collage techniques. His works range from tableaux composed of cut-outs to identically-sized boxes containing trashy trinkets to sculptures welded from the scrap metal of old farming tools.

Ibolya Pertuska Markó Amateur painter.
She started painting as a pensioner in the art group of József Szalai. She has a remarkable sensitivity for colours and is considered a promising talent. Her works have been well received at countless amateur exhibitions as well as several individual shows. She paints still lifes, portraits of her family and imaginary landscapes in oils.

Katalin Rácz Fodor (1966, Kiskunhalas) Herman Prize winning graphic artist, artist-teacher.
Amongst her expressive pictures are scenes of the town, portraits, representational depictions and natural studies. Her design work is significant, including stamps, crests, logos, book covers and certificates.

Benő Rébék (1970, Kiskunhalas) Social care nurse, amateur graphic artist.
Rébék’s line graphics, influenced by the clear style and approach to form of Károly Kós, discover architectural relics of the past. He has drawn countless studies in both Transylvania and Transdanubia, preserving the characteristic residences, churches and statues of those areas. With a similar approach he has also sketched his hometown, Kiskunhalas. His representational drawings always depict symbolic figures, employing recognizably Secession lines and an ornamental approach.

Anna Sári Császár Nursery nurse, ceramicist.
Her art is a continuation of the folk-inspired ceramics of Margit Kovács and Ilona Kis Roóz. Symbolic fairy-tale figures, clowns, musicians and old women all feature in her representational compositions. Her works use the human figure’s – the female form’s – power of creating symbols with great inventiveness. One of her most interesting works is the chamotte stove in the shape of a woman, which can be found in the artist’s own home.

Sándor Szabó (1944, Kiskunhalas) Sign-writer, owner of the Tanya Galéria (Farmhouse Gallery), ‘farm painter’.
Szabó paints the farms and forests surrounding Kiskunhalas and also the lives of the forest-dwellers. We can also find hunting scenes and ‘portraits’ of woodland creatures such as deer, wild boar and foxes.

József Szalai (1955, Kiskunhalas) Art teacher, painter, sculptor.
During his career Szalai has produced almost a thousand oil paintings. It is characteristic of his multi-faceted artistic talent that he even published a book, ‘The Singer’, in 2001 and painted large-scale oils to accompany it. He is influenced by Surrealism. From his statues and wood carvings, the most typical can be found in two of Halas’s twin towns – Kronach in Germany and Kanjiža in Serbia.

László Szalai (1964, Kiskunhalas) Art teacher, painter.
His large, colourful oil paintings depict worlds of fantasy and dreams. His slightly psychedelic works are influenced by Surrealism and Symbolism.

Imre Szebényi (1923, Doboz – 1983, Toronto) Sculptor.
One of the representatives of the new wave of Hungarian sculpture from the 1960s, Szebényi cast off the Realist approach of the fifties and sought new possibilities in form and material. A classic example of this is the 1973 statue ‘Cumanian Erudition’ (to be found fixed to one of the outer walls of Szilády Áron Grammar School), which is a departure from the previously-accepted form of public statues with its elongated proportions and welded metal surface. A catalogue of Szebényi’s oeuvre was published by the Thorma János Museum in 2000.

Tibor Székely (1935, Budapest) Architectural technician, amateur painter.
Székely’s pastel pictures depict the local environment of hills of shifting sands and leafy groves with lyrical intuition combined with precise faithfulness to form and balanced delicate tones. His works have an individual inner realism and have achieved countless successes during the artist’s nearly forty-year career. The most important pictures from his oeuvre are exhibited in the Thorma János Museum in 2004.

Jenő Ternyák (1936, Kiskunhalas) Cameraman for Halas TV, nature photographer.
Ternyák has been photographing the events in Kiskunhalas and the flora to be found surrounding our town for the last four decades. As well as in his home town, his nature photos have been exhibited abroad on several occasions. In 1993 he published a photographic album, ‘Protected Plants of the Kiskunhalas Region’. In 1994 he was awarded with Halas’s ‘Pro Urbe’ Award for his work in the town.

Károly Zsebő (1952, Kiskunhalas) Entrepreneur, amateur painter.
His oil paintings depict the characteristic motifs of the countryside around Halas, abandoned farmhouses, solitary old trees and groves of sand and scrub. His work has been the subject of several well-received exhibitions in his home town.

János Thorma (1870, Kiskunhalas – 1937, Baia Mare, Romania) Painter.
Thorma is connected with Kiskunhalas through his origins, his relatives remaining here and his annual visits to the town. He learnt under Bertalan Székely and later in Paris. His most famous picture, ‘The Blood Witness of Arad’, was painted between 1893 and 1896. He participated in the foundation of the artists colony of Nagybánya, Transylvania (today Baia Mare, Romania), and was a significant mentor there. Thorma’s other widely known painting, ‘Rise Up, Magyar!’, took decades to complete. His painting entitled ‘October the First’ was awarded gold medals at the World Exhibitions of both Munich and St Louis. Thorma’s later period is typified by plein-air works. A memorial exhibition of János Thorma’s paintings was organized in the museum named after him in 2000. Alongside many of his other works, his two famous monumental historical canvases are on permanent display there.

Text: Károly Szűcs art historian, photos: Károly Szűcs, János Ferinc