Adam Szentpétery

Biography

Adam Szentpétery dates his exhibiting career from 1984. By now it has come to 21 solo and 142 group exhibitions.

He was born on 24 February 1956 in Rožňava, then in Czechoslovakia. Hungarian by origin, he became a Slovak artist; he still lives and works in Slovakia, in Rožňava and Košice. From 1971 to 1975 Szentpétery studied at the School of Applied Arts in Košice, in the department of graphic arts. Then, from 1976 to 1982, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, in the studio of monumental painting (murals and large-scale painting for public buildings); his teachers there were Dezider Castiglione and Ivan Vychlopen. The monumental school, it seems to me, explains his taste for the large surface and strict construction, though I have seen no direct statement by the artist to that effect. In the 1980s geometry became the basis of his paintings. The Slovak art historian Vladimír Beskid describes it this way: line, colour and surface are the primary elements of his pictorial system, and geometry acts as a matrix onto which individual painterly moves are placed. Over the decades Szentpétery has built a coherent programme of geometric abstraction. Beskid calls it a distinctive contribution to contemporary painting in Slovakia and notes at the same time that in the local scene the artist remains a solitary figure. His colour is very intense, yet restrained.

Since 1999 Szentpétery has headed the Studio of Contemporary Image at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice. He has been an associate professor since 2004. In 2007 he was awarded the Hungarian state prize, the Mihály Munkácsy Prize, in Budapest.

His work has been shown mainly in countries of the European Union, and also in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. In 2018–2019 his most recent works were exhibited at the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum in Bratislava.

Szentpétery’s paintings are in the collections of the East Slovak Gallery and the East Slovak Museum in Košice, the Mining Museum in Rožňava, the Orava Gallery in Dolný Kubín, the Ján Koniarek Gallery in Trnava and the Danubiana museum. Outside Slovakia they are held by the Miskolc Gallery in Hungary, the City Gallery in Cottbus and the Beratzhausen Collection in Germany, the AVS Collection in Prague, in Brno, and the creative centre in Gyergyószárhegy (Lăzarea) in Romania. There are also works in private collections.