An artistic career that spans some five decades commands respect. He possesses the talent, human sensitivity and worldly grounding of a master inside his soul and of course the historical era - the age to which this creative journey is linked. His career trajectory has progressed along a splendid curve from the moment his talent was first discovered right up until he reached an age that radiates wisdom.
Like all contemporaries, György Urbán started out from a scene-based realist method, performing works that were able to communicate by means of recognition and the beautiful heritage found in the natural environment. Paintings were created in conformity with accepted value systems. This approach was suited to the master's individual character, and in effect this is what his teachers instilled into the career-starting artist by way of advice for the journey ahead. He achieved some success, given that he was a sensitive artist, and quite soon was capable of speaking up for himself on the subject of his choosing. The works in which he combined the realist method with Impressionist lessons on the use of colour and method of composition are genuinely beautiful; the strength of these works primarily lies in their spirit. However, György Urbán did not want to get stuck in a circle of satisfaction stemming from success. He enhanced his awareness of materials, cultural education and intelligence by consciously studying, and was quite simply excited by the visual adventures offered with new discoveries in natural science. This "cosmic world view" appears in his art, and his interest has been aroused by the representation of metaphysical correlations. Naturally the works he created in the spirit of this endeavour have already crossed the figurative border. Dynamism, movement and rhythm were vital in compositions, while a demand for expressiveness appeared in the use of form and colour. We can state, without any exaggeration, that the intellectual exactitude and often evocative virtuosity, which proved the ars poetica on his artistic career when these works were created, and soon made this phase of his art a success, demonstrated his independent voice, and the full sovereignty of his career became clear at this stage.
The last two decades have been the period of fulfilment, where his art, as well as being differentiated in terms of conceptual content, developed iconographic systems linked to personality, and clear professional problems have been highlighted, such as the connection and relationship between painting and sculpture, for example. With his brilliant master's grounding, he moulded spherical pictures with the demands of spatial plastic arts, in which he revealed the possibilities of interconnection by combining all the advantages of the two sectors - using the variety of form and surface. And naturally he progressed to the next stage when choosing among the values of simultaneous progressive endeavours by managing to include in his work all the episodes, which openly featured - alongside one another, interdependently and in an interrelated way - kineticism, interplay of lights, marking out of space concealing various degrees of excitement, with the same results that have characterized his art to date. This phase of György Urbán's art no longer simply took the shape of enchanting beauty, but formed the basis for a very serious conceptual system - it is not recognition that is crucial here but rather the raising of ontology problems. György Urbán's art fits into the typical "task web" of contemporary art, and maybe it is no exaggeration to state that in a certain sense it is unique in art today, in terms of its differentiation.
The introductory words were characterized by a bow of the head, and so the closing thought should also be some kind of acknowledgement, given that the intellectual freshness, interest and openness within his works have turned György Urbán into an "eternal youth". He treads his chosen vocational path with incredibly rigorous consistency, and has created a series of works of indisputable value. Thanks for doing so.

 

Loránd Bereczky
Chief Executive of the Hungarian National Gallery