Bird Market III. (1988 körül)

Péter Földi graduated from the Teacher Training College (Eger) in 1972 with a degree in Mathematics and Drawing. Then he returned to his native village, Somoskőújfalu, to teach drawing and painting. The gesture of "staying here" or "returning" has a decisive significance in the development of his world view and his art. In particular, he came into close contact with nature and animals. At first, he drew and painted the plants around him (onions, beans, potatoes, corn cobs, etc.), seemingly insignificant subjects. In all this, he embodied the view that in his world, man was equal to birds, animals and plants. The great masters of the turn of the century, including Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee and Nolde, sought out the relics of archaic and primitive artists. They juxtaposed the empty forms and rules of academicism with folk art, the culture of primitive peoples, the world of the naïve and children.  

Földi is one of the few in contemporary Hungarian art for whom folk culture, the naïve and the drawing and painting children represent a return to the sources of primeval existence. During his travels abroad, he was greatly influenced by the culture of primitive peoples. "The gesture-born oak-blue dream of children's drawing is as much my ideal as the cultic sign, which is precise to the extreme. (I am as attracted by the instrumental as by the artistic)," Földi said in an interview. In his art, the influence of children's drawings can be seen in several ways, for example in the differences in proportions, the depiction of giant heads lined up next to each other, and the flatness of the forms. In addition to the children's world, he pays particular attention to folk art. Not only to the material memories in concrete materials, but also to folk songs, folk tales and folk prayers. He is particularly interested in the geometric nature of the arrangement of patterns, such as the symmetry of the seeds inside the crop, or the laws of repetition and eclipse.

The message of her art is ethically motivated, exploring themes of freedom, bondage and vulnerability: 'the trap, the noose, the pit, the crow, even the pen and the nest are all real or possible perishing places for creatures born to freedom', writes Magdalena Supka. For her, the most tragic animal is the bird, the sole master of the sky thanks to its wings, yet its chicks are frequent prey for nest-robbing humans and animals. The pastel in Bird Market III shows a top view of such chicks. Some are almost fully grown and preparing for the inevitable flight, while the smallest has not yet developed wings or opened its eyes.