Biography
Elek Győri was born in 1905 in Tiszaladány. Following his father's craft, he studied blacksmithing in Tokaj, which he practiced for six years while drawing village pictures with a slate rod. He sent these drawings to the editorial office of the newspaper Sunday in 1931, after which he was embraced by art critic Jenő Bálint. In 1931 he moved to Budapest, where he worked as a day laborer at the Goldberger factory. He spent his life in miserable conditions: he lived in a furniture car and later in a cellar apartment. In the 1930s, he became more and more involved in painting, an activity that was noticed by several art patrons and folk writers. He first appeared at the National Salon's exhibition entitled Talent Talents in 1934, about which Lajos Kassák declared in the Nyugat: “ they are about people living among them, that is, their true selves, whose umbilical cord could not be torn from the ancient earth by the robot. ”
Győr appeared in the exhibition of ancient talents several times in the 1930s, and then exhibited in the Netherlands in 1938. Breaking for a short time with his naive style of painting, he studied art at the College of Fine Arts from 1940 to 1943. In 1945 he returned to his native village, Tiszaladány, where he became a celebrated painter. After his death, his works were exhibited in several places: in 1964 in Linz, in 1966 in Bratislava, in 1967 in Székesfehérvár and Nyíregyháza, in 1970 in Miskolc and Budapest, in 1972 in the Swiss Winterthur and in Budapest. In the Exhibition of the Century, and in 1975 at the Kunsthaus in Zurich
