Gábor Szenteleki
1978, Körmend
Gábor Szenteleki graduated from the Painting Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2005. His work focuses on depicting the human figure. A distinctive feature of his artistic approach is his long-term engagement with specific motifs that capture his attention. He explores the expressive potential of these motifs through series of works, ranging from paintings of various sizes to tondos stretched over embroidery frames.
In his earlier works, Szenteleki investigated the expressive power of movement and facial expression in figures. These emotionally charged, tension-filled, and surreal compositions often displayed characteristics reminiscent of Baroque painting. Over time, the protagonists of his paintings began to simplify, becoming more and more abstract: they transformed into faceless, elongated, and rounded forms: to distorted tangles of body parts. While his focus remains on the human body, his approach has diverged significantly from traditional representation.
In his latest series, this simplification is pushed to its extreme. The ‘bodies’ depicted in his paintings are no longer fragments of the human form but rather independent entities that evoke the sense of a human body. Szenteleki explores how, by balancing on the boundary between figurative representation and abstraction and using minimal painterly tools, it is still possible to depict the essence of humanity.
In his Home series, the figures resemble archetypal houses cloaked in human skin, while in the Modules series, the protagonist is reduced to a cube. Here, individuality and uniqueness are revealed solely through subtle details: ‘imprints of memories, traces of sunburns, scars, freckles, or the patches of blushing bring to life the hidden human presence within them.’
In 2011, Gábor Szenteleki was awarded the Prize and Special Prize of the Csongrád County Government, as well as a scholarship to Paris from the Art Committee of the Budapest Municipality (Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris). In 2017, he received the Jenő Maticska Prize.
