Harmony or disharmony II. Sculpture

Laszlo Nemeth is a Hungarian artist whose ceramic sculptures simultaneously unsettle, provoke, intrigue and amuse. Some present an apparent conflict of the macabre and comedic, others imply an undercurrent of political unrest. Nemeth was born in Russian-occupied Hungary in 1965, the ‘Iron Curtain’ era of austerity and little or no access to western culture. A self-proclaimed rebel, he shunned the confines of the Communist state education system, choosing to satisfy his curiosity for learning with books, especially on physics, evolution and genetics. From the latter would emerge the personal repertoire of his art motifs, shaped in part perhaps by the stark graphic styles of the Eastern Bloc. In his village, exposure to art had been minimal and art education nonexistent; in 1992, none of that was to matter. The Communist regime had collapsed and the last Russian troops were leaving Hungary. Doors to the West were open and new opportunities for self-expression available. Out of curiosity, at age 27, Nemeth enrolled in a two-year part-time ceramics course whose instructors included Zsuzsa Fuzesi, Peter Korompai and Tamas Szarka. A visit that same year to Venice’s Guggenheim proved that his imagination need have no bounds, and with a distinctive personal vocabulary waiting to be translated into art, his work was quickly embraced by an emerging Hungarian art scene. After 20 years of exhibitions, symposia and travel it became all too apparent that the international art world is an English speaking one and that growing up under the Communist regime could have kept this door closed. Today, however, Nemeth is multilingual, living and working in a more multinational community on the island of Corfu, Greece.