Vita:Fekete Tamás (szobrász)

message: Kérem szépen azokat, akik jól tudnak angolul, hogy az alábbi szövegből, ha idejük engedi,  szemezgessenek be az életrajzba tényeket. Egy-két dolgot már betettem ebből én is, úgyhogy forrásként már elsőként le van hivatkozva.
Aztán törölni lehetne ezt a tartalmat.
Nagyon köszönöm!
– • Terosesvárom válaszodat 2009. április 19., 13:48 (CEST)
Tamás Fekete, a sculptor who works in wood, stone and metal and in all the three-dimensional art forms, is one of the most strikingly original figures in Hungarian art today. 
He was born in Budapest, in 1931, and as a teenager experienced the vicissitudes of history and existence in Eastern Europe: his Jewish father was deported in 1944. His last memory of his father was when he stretched out his hand from behind the barbed wire and handed him his ring. The sculptor still has the ring; he has never worn it. His father never came home again. He is still present as a simple yet moving bronze small sculpture: on a side table stands a typical wireless set from the 1920s, beside it a slim, elegant man in a bow tie, listening intently with head down (most likely to the BBC news, as did most of the Hungarian middle class at the time). The statue was given the title Poor Father in the Year Before Last of the War by the sculptor's best friend, the recently deceased novelist Imre Szász. On top of everything else, in 1944 Jews had to hand in their radios. The memory of this old radio is affectionately preserved in another of Fekete's small sculptures. Just as his father's memory is captured in another poignant piece in which the man himself is not present, just a jacket thrown nonchalantly over the back of a chair (Chair with Coat).
At the age of 13 Tamás Fekete was left alone with his mother. "My mother managed to live from hand to mouth with elegance," he says of his mother, who raised him single-handed through those harsh years that included the siege of Budapest, the Stalinist era, the 1956 Revolution and then the early Kádár period, years of fear, uncertainty, lack of freedom and deprivation. The life-size wooden sculpture My Mother, showing her anxiety in bringing up her son and her all-embracing love, appeared many years later. The ochre surface of the finely polished wood, the resignedly lowered head with hair braided in a wreath, the sunken shoulders, the thin, worn, but perfectly straight, almost Cubist, figure together with disproportionately large hands hanging from outstretched arms, and an old-woman's slightly pigeontoed feet showing below the long skirt, carry a rich emotional message. This is a deeply moving statue and almost tells a story to the viewer. It radiates tragedy, fragility, transience and love without a trace of sentimentality.
As a member of the middle class, Fekete was not admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts. His teacher at secondary school encouraged him to draw. But he had to earn his living. He got a job as a crane driver, and then learnt the trade of technical photography. In 1951 he was called up for army service. As a reward for saving a life, he was sent on an officers' training course. After being demobbed he took a job in a large factory. In 1956 he took advantage of his officer's training to help the fighting revolutionaries; as a consequence he was stripped of his rank after the Revolution was crushed. He could consider himself lucky that he escaped prison. In time he became a tool-maker, later a designer, learning the technicalities of working with metals. In those days there were various educational courses available for workers. Fekete continued his studies in the factory fine arts circle. He soon became a member of one of the important art groups of the period, The Young Artists' Club, the members of which (naturally under supervision and restrictions) were given a chance to exhibit their work. He learned from very good artists. The oeuvre and exemplary moral, intellectual and human attitude of the outstanding Hungarian sculptor of the period, Béni Ferenczy, by then a classicist after Cubist experiments, had the strongest influence on him.
The young artist wanting to break out of a technical and working class environment tried to find his own path. The world of Budapest intellectuals, lively and colourful despite the scant opportunities and strictly controlled limits set by cultural politics, turned him increasingly into a thinking intellectual and conscious artist who was not prepared to compromise. He made friends with fellow artists, began to get commissions, and, at the end of the 1970s, held his first exhibition. He managed to go abroad: first to Munich and Florence, later travelling widely in Europe and even visiting the US. He resisted the constant temptation to emigrate, however, and always returned home.
In 1972 he got his first monumental commission. At this time he started to create his very individual small sculptures in metal. These enchanting pieces in copper and bronze, hardly more than a span in height, made to scale and with a realistic effect, reflect the gentle melancholy of passing and the affectionate nostalgia of the artist for the environment and experiences of his childhood as well as his playful character. Stove with Umbrella consists of a man's umbrella drying off beside a typical old iron stove. My Grandmother's Dresser is an exact depiction of the time; on top of the old-style dresser typical of a middle-class home stand a couple of jars of bottled fruit; who knows what is hidden in the slightly pulled out drawer, and the open door of the lower part of the sideboard reveals the saucepans standing orderly on a shelf. At one time the Tailor's Dummy was an essential accessory of small dressmaking workshops, just as the former bellows Camera on a tripod was of a photographer's studio. Perhaps the most moving of these pieces is the Cobbler's Workshop with its scattered tools and true-to-life untidiness. Or the infinitely sad In Memory of Fallen Soldiers, with its shot up machine gun and the soldier's greatcoat on the ground, beside which one should imagine the dead, most likely young, machine-gunner and the whole madness of war: whoever he didn't manage to shoot shot him. (This sculpture has a life-size version too, in the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.) These thought-provoking small masterpieces, full of feeling but never sentimental, are unique in today's Hungarian sculpture. In the words of an art critic: they are slightly hyper-realist object statues, touched by pop art. But every one of them - including those I haven't listed here - could only have been made by Tamás Fekete. 
During his small sculpture period, portraits make their appearance in Fekete's oeuvre. Two of these could be part of this series, one of a film director and the other of a well-known film and stage director and actor, though in fact they are models for lifesize portraits erected in the open air in Budapest. By sculpting the characteristic stance and gestures of the figures Fekete achieves what he wants and what is expected of a portrait: not only are the figures immediately recognizable to those who knew them, but the essence of their character is also clearly depicted in these two very diverse full-figure portraits. This is naturally valid for his lifesize bronze busts too of the 1970s and 80s. Among these are portraits of writers who are near to Fekete both thanks to their works and as human beings: the tragically-fated Isaac Babel, and two Hungarian friends, the outstanding poet István Vas and the absurdist satirical prose writer and playwright István Örkény. On a pillar in Museumstrasse in Vienna stands a bronze bust of György Bessenyei, Maria Theresa's body guards officer and the reformer of Hungarian literature, a work which is a far cry from the clichés of so many statues of great men in public places. In this same spirit Fekete models the full-figure statue of the greatest Hungarian statesman of the nineteenth century, Lajos Kossuth (1998). Kossuth's statue stands in the squares of numerous Hungarian towns in various heroic poses, Fekete, however, doesn't portray him as the powerful statesman who dethroned the Habsburgs, the legendary orator, the daring initiator of the struggle for freedom, or, after its defeat, the exile hoping to return for 45 years, right up to his death. This Kossuth is leaning back in an armchair on a plinth supported by two pillars; beside him is a table on which there is a ancient printing press. He is sitting cross-legged, one of his hands rests on the table, while the other might be getting ready to gesticulate; his head is raised, maybe he is about to say something, his attentive, familiar features suggest a wakeful restlessness, his dynamic being. At that time, in 1848, he was the Finance Minister of the first responsible Hungarian government, but soon he would become the leader, and somehow the sculpture seems to give a hint of this too.
Among Fekete's statues in public places is the Tree of Life (1975), in memory of the composer Zoltán Kodály. It used to stand in the main square of the town of Kecskemét, the home of the internationally renowned Kodály Institute. The huge intertwined tree in bronze with its amazing amount of leaves, each one welded separately, not only presented a special vision, it could also be considered a living symbol of renewal: since people often broke off the leaves to take them home as souvenirs the sculptor kept having to replace them - to such a degree that eventually he could not keep pace with the "vandalism" and the famous tree was removed to safety. The bronze Engine (1975), this lovely old steam engine with its coal tender, was produced to life scale too, and today stands in the playground of a nursery school. Many of its parts are moveable and the whole piece is absolutely true to life. You can clamber onto it and play at being an engine driver.
This movability, ability to operate and functionality is one of the important characteristics of Fekete's latest period, which started in the 1980s and still continues. Once again he is doing something completely original and unique: he is creating ingenious machine statues out of copper, bronze and steel in the size of small sculpture. But these are not any old machines, they are wonderful to look at, complicated, mystical, never before seen and in reality never existing, silkily shining machines. They have distant ancestors, however: the great Italian Renaissance architect Fillippo Brunelleschi built, or rather, drew them, for the most part centuries ahead of his time. It was partly Fekete's trip to Florence in 1968, and partly an album containing Brunelleschi's drawings that set him to work on this new series of sculptures; so far he has completed eleven and is currently working on the twelfth. With amazing ingenuity, he designed and made a cross-section of Brunelleschi's chef d'oeuvre, the dome of Florence Cathedral, in the course of construction (Homage to Brunelleschi VI). It is interesting to note that the master built the huge dome in an unprecedented way, without the use of scaffolding. It is here that Fekete's experiences as a factory tool-maker and designer really come to the fore: on the basis of the existing drawings we see a partial solution to the incredibly daring architectural and mechanical task - which may not actually have been solved in this way, or not entirely. The rest of the Brunelleschi statues are in a similar vein: various complicated and asymmetrical hoists and elevators, transmissions' solutions, ratchet mechanisms, pulley systems, or, for example, the cog-wheel system reminiscent of a clutch which was designed to avoid having to constantly turn and reyoke the oxen when loading the cart. In fact this is more or less the predecessor of the clutch in our cars today. And other unnameable constructions ŕ la Brunelleschi, but copyright Fekete, because he develops them from the mechanical point of view and raises them to an aesthetic plane, to works of art. They all "work", and are truly delightful - one can't resist walking around them, lifting them up, touching the gorgeous, smooth metal surfaces and trying out the moveable parts. Apart from bronze, copper and steel, some of them have parts in oak and ebony.
 
Today Fekete is a known, recognised and exhibited artist with several important awards to his name. He has been written up frequently in art magazines, and two beautifully illustrated books have been published on him. Besides small sculpture and statues in public places, he has been commissioned to make gravestones, medals and relief sculpture. He lives alone, working with great energy in his studio (which at times seems more like an assembly workshop than an artist's studio) on the third floor of an apartment block in the centre of Budapest. He is an open-minded, serious, wise man, interested in everything, of wide xperience and with a real sense of humour. As for future works, Fekete claims that his runelleschi statues will give him enough inspiration to last a lifetime.
thread_title: Kérés