Péter Gémes (1951-1996)

Visual artist. From the 1970s onwards, the works of Péter Gémes were related both to the contemporary Polish and Hungarian art scene, and to the traditions of international art. Gémes studied graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw between 1972 and 1976, and few years later he returned to Hungary. From the 1980s, he turned towards photography and developed his unique lighting technique, and created negative-like black-and-white shots of his own body and models. The starting point of his works in this decade was primarily ancient art and Greek mythology, then later philosophy and Christian symbols also became significant in his work. Inspired by these fields and utilizing his individual imaging technique, he was dealing with the universal issues of physical and mental existence, the intermediate state, the nature of the afterlife and darkness and light. In the 1990s, he created his large-scale systems from less and less recognizable elements still using images of his own body parts. His series and sequences were sometimes “spiritually” inspired (Apocryph, 1993; Black Square, 1993), and at other times abstract subject matters such as time appeared in them (Diary – One Week, 1994; Diary – Pyramid, 1995). These works, as well as the Columns (1995) series compiled from leg motifs, can be considered as a summary of his artistic practice spanning only two decades. Gémes’ retrospective exhibition was organized at Kunsthalle Budapest in 2000, his works can be found in the collections of the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest), Muzeum Sztuki Współczesnej (Radom) and Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart), among others.