István Árkossy

Born in 1943 in Cluj Napoca.
Graduated from the University of Fine Arts in Cluj Napoca in 1966 with a degree in graphic art. For two decades he was the graphic editor of the Cluj weekly literary-artistic newspaper Utunk. Since 1987 he lives in Budapest. He is one of the most versatile personalities of the Cluj School of Graphic Arts, having mastered all genres and techniques (drawing, woodcut, monotype, etching, collography, illustration, poster, magazine design, blackboard graphics, etc.) and having set up a workshop of his artistic imagination. His graphic work became increasingly colourful, and in 1982 he presented an exhibition of paintings to the public. In his graphic compositions, the associative system of motifs, signs and allusions, which he had developed in his paintings, is renewed in the sensuous, evocative fidelity to the subject and the view of the masters of the great artistic periods, the Renaissance and the Baroque, and transformed into romantic and surrealist visions.
The effect of the concreteness and suggestiveness of these fantastic visions and locations, their particular duality, is enhanced by the graphic process of painting, which results in a superior draughtsmanship rarely seen today, which is expressed in a radiance of colours shining from within, in infinite shades, even before the surface is varnished. With his whole approach, he is a faithful chronicler, a sensitive assessor and exponent of his own values, of the spirituality and humanity of his time. The most fitting affinity of his vision is with the poetic image, he lives with its floating freedoms, and thus for his profound observer he even shows and preserves that pensive, dreamy contemplation of things in the world, of possible spectacles of existence and destruction, which is always so beneficially characteristic of dreamers, of ‘poets’. He is a world-creating artist, real experiences are deeply embedded in him, and everything is reinterpreted in his work, embedded in a new kind of synthesis, a new kind of relationship. He creates his own inner world. A completely rethought, deeply abstract universe reveals itself in his paintings, drawings and etchings, the cosmic perspective is combined with the complex of experiences arising from the universal interest.
He is a member of the National Association of Hungarian Artists, the Association of Hungarian Artists and Craftsmen, the Association of Hungarian Graphic Artists.