Biography
Tamás Péli is one of the most important figures in Hungarian Roma art. In 1962 he became a student at the Budapest Secondary School of Fine and Applied Arts, and after his unsuccessful application to the Hungarian College of Fine Arts in 1968, he was awarded a scholarship to study mural at the Dutch College of Fine Arts. In the Netherlands, he made several large-scale works, the most significant of which is a nearly fifty-square-foot panel adorning the walls of the Dutch Academy of Fine Arts. He completed his studies in 1974 and returned to Hungary. In 1983 he painted the so-called Birth Panel in Tiszadob, which is was exhibited in Kassel in 2022 at the Documenta 15. In addition to painting, he also played an active role in public life as a Member of Parliament for the Hungarian Socialist Party from 1992 to 1994. Tamás Péli died in 1994, at a very young age, at the age of 46.
In his paintings, Péli tried to depict the fate, image and religion of the Hungarian Gypsies at a high artistic level. His stylistic solutions combined the features of academic and naive art, his expression was based on expressive-surreal elements, and his contents were based on literary narratives. His favorite genre was portrait.
