Houses on the banks of the Seine (1969)

Péter Ujvári attended the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts between 1960-1966, where his teachers were Aurél Bernáth and János Kmetty. In 1968 he visited Paris, spent a longer study trip in Sweden, and then spent a few months in Rome on a scholarship in 1991. His first solo exhibition took place in 1971 at the István Király Museum in Székesfehérvár, where he showed works from the five years since the college. Márta Kovalovszky wrote the following about these early pictures: "It was as if the wind had suddenly begun to blow in the classical compositions: in a different atmosphere, born under a different climate of mood, the world became messier and more vivid. And in this cheerful "draught" everything was revived". The quote encapsulates everything that is at the heart of Ujházi's art. The acerbic humour and absurdity; the listing (taking inventory) and then seemingly arbitrary rearrangement of all the (Existing) elements; and finally the isolation of the creative position (Creator), which is both topical and timeless. 

A characteristic feature of Ujházi's oeuvre is the duality of the personal (homeliness) and the outside. This is reflected in the simultaneous use of different points of view, in the specific mapping, in the solitary figures and, in contrast, in the disorderly mass of faceless real or imagined human communities. According to Tibor Várnagy, Uhazi's gaze is the gaze of an outsider, and his work is a diary-like record of what he sees. Ujházi also regularly documented his travels and personal experiences with works, grouping them into cycles (e.g. Nadapi pictures, Paris, New York or Lisbon series). Houses on the banks of the Seine (1969) is a very early work, which both evokes the modern Parisian pictures of his ancestors, the great painters of the 20th century, but also anticipates the figurative, cartoonish calligraphy of his later works. His descriptive, narrative language is light, almost weightless. A kind of 20th-century 'impressionism', as (in contrast) he casts his tired colours in quick strokes on the ground, retaining their original orangey-brownish colour. 

Ujvári's narrative painting, laced with irony, is both a history and a chronicle of everyday life. The peculiar cartography of his paintings, composed of multiple views, led him almost inevitably to asamblage and boxes in the mid-seventies, then to collaged, three-dimensional works on paper and dustbins in the eighties, before turning to sculpture in the nineties, and giving birth to a grotesque ceramic panopticon.