Balint Szombathy
Balint Szombathy. Photo by Miklós Déri
Balint Szombathy (Paćir, Vojvodina, Serbia 1950) lives in Budapest. He is an artist representing the Hungarian minority, whose production is deeply influenced by his constant life on the border, between Hungary and Vojvodina (former Yugoslavia). He started his career almost forty years ago, working during transitory times, from the real socialism in politically relatively open Yugoslav space, toward the current turbulent wild global capitalism. During the seventies, he brought the concepts and information about contemporary international art (conceptual art, mail art, body art, land art, performance art) to the East, while he passed West-wards information about then completely unknown East European underground, conceptualism and neo-avant-garde. These hybrid conditions enabled him to act as a nomadic subject between different political and socio-cultural realities and led him to build a provocative artistic strategy of critique, subversion and deconstruction of cultural and national canons. His practice included a wide range of artistic activities, from the visual poetry, through processual art, land art, video and performance. It was boldly carried out in public spaces through vivid interaction with the audience of an ideologically saturated and conflict society.
He participated in numerous shows as REZ / CUT, Museum of contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia (2018), Left Performance Histories, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK), Berlin, (2018), Non-Aligned Modernity, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, (2017), Art Has No Alternative (An Archive of Artists in Action), tranzit.sk, Bratislava, Slovakia(2015), Les Promesses du passé, Centre Pompidou – Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris (2010), Body and the East – Exit Art, New York City, NY(2001), After the Wall, Art and culture in post-Communist Europe, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1999). He was the founder member of the Bosch+Bosch Group (Subotica, 1969-1976).