Attila Balla was born in Baja in 1959 and spent his childhood in Dunaújváros. In the 1970s, he continued his studies in various self-education circles here. Under the direction of Károly Koffán and István Birkás. He spent the summers in Zebegény, where the landscape as an artistic theme seeped into his paintings. From 1981, he lived in Sweden for seven years, where he studied applied graphics at the College of Applied Arts in Stockholm. Returning home, he visited the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1988-1992, his teachers were Pál Gerzson and Zoltán Tölg-Molnár.
He has settled in Csongrád-Bokros for a quarter of a century, living in seclusion in a studio house built in the building of a former farm school. He has been creating his impulsive, gestural, large-scale paintings here for years.
According to his words, when he paints, he works with tools of fine art such as harmony, aesthetics, proportion, and balance. He includes them in a transcendent unity, but does not construct the image in advance. His career is characterized by continuous experimentation with materials and techniques. Over the years, he has created a unique painting process that is unique to him: he mixes pigment and tempera with sand, which he muddies and then dries in the sun or nowadays in a drying cabinet. He grinds the resulting material and then applies it to the substrate, which in many cases is the paper he has drawn himself. The solid surface created in this way is occasionally scraped back, thus creating a unique effect. Its main theme is the external and internal landscape, the presentation of spiritual experiences in a landscape-like form.
For the first time, the public of Szeged can see the works of Attila Balla on such a large scale in the exhibition Mythic Paths. The selection, which features around twenty works, focuses on the mythical layers of his life’s work. In the artist’s private mythology, the nature cult of the indigenous Indians, the Mexican snake god and the pagan Madonna, the world of motifs of the Peruvian Nazca lines and prehistoric cave drawings, Buddhist iconography and Jackson Pollock’s gestural painting fit side by side. Attila Balla’s painting is characterized by incomparable bursts of color and pictorial tensions of ancient energies. The exhibition, open until the end of August, will feature mythical paths that lead the modern man, alienated from nature, back to the ancient mysteries and natural energies, the gallery announced.
2024-07-27 12:49:53