Béla Nagy Abodi

Béla Nagy Abodi
Abodi Nagy Béla
Born	(1918-07-13)13 July 1918 Székelyszenterzsébet, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (now Eliseni, Romania)
Died	9 December 2012(2012-12-09) (aged 94) Budapest, Hungary
Known for	painter, graphic artist, professor
Website	http://www.abodi.org, http://www.abodi.hu

Béla Nagy Abodi (Hungarian: Abodi Nagy Béla; 13 July 1918 – 9 December 2012) was Hungarian painter, and professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca.

He studied in the class of Camil Ressu at the Academia de Belle-Arte in Bucharest, and ended up then at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, as a student of István Szőnyi. He spent five years as a soldier in the Hungarian army, then as prisoner of war in Russia. He was a teacher at the Kolozsvár Academy of Fine Arts, actually University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca, Romania, then he worked as the head of the department and a master for generations of artists between 1949 and 1983 [2]. He has been a Kolozsvár resident until 2008, and lives since then in Budapest.

Béla Nagy Abodi is one of the most universal representatives of modern Hungarian and Romanian fine arts. He is a typically Hungarian and at the same time, a distinctively Transylvanian artist. He is a highly qualified, conscious artist, but at the same time a sensitive, true colourist, "a painter of the soul". His marvellous artwork bridges over several artistic periods and expressive systems of forms, though it constitutes a distinct entity: Abodi's dominant artistic character can be immediately traced in his diverse and always renewing oeuvre. He is a daring experimentalist, a persistent seeker who never strains after visual artifices or unnatural stylistic unity for his own sake. Abodi is the archetype of a professional and intellectual creator who is in possession of a complete range of professional tools and who is endowed with superior knowledge. His abundant lifework is a mine of deeply sympathizing, socially committed, objective-realist or dramatic and shockingly expressive depictions, at other times pictorial satires deploying the weapons of irony or even dead-on sarcasm, and the master-like composition of absurd and grotesque figurality. His later works are characterised by monumental pictorial architectures, genius "full orchestra" structures, figural-decorative compositions that are inspired by Hungarian folk art, and then geometrical-abstract or abstract-expressionist representations.

The pictures he painted at a later age are staggeringly clear artistic and deeply human conclusions: they are the pictures of an age, genius clinical aspects of the period. Abodi is mostly known as an artist who is wrestling with questions of human fate and as a painter of compositions that create master-like systems of pictures.