Draft:Gábor Városi

Gábor Városi (born 10 December 1965) is a contemporary Hungarian painter, sculptor, photographer and architectural designer.

He is the creator of the Poet’s Garden Villa Park and Gallery, a residential complex and avant-garde, habitable sculpture built around a statue park, a Zen garden and an exhibition space. He was a student of Victor Vasarely, Ignác Kokas, Gábor Dienes and Zoltán Tölg-Molnár. He is known for his monumental, kinetic, glass sculptures with varying lighting, abstract expressionist paintings, atavistic glass masks and unique buildings.

His most recent work includes experimenting with connecting of physical paintings to blockchains and virtual reality. Traditional panel paintings complemented by monitors allow for a slow metamorphosis, hiding messages that are also integrated into the virtual space as NFTs.

Early life and studies
Gábor Városi was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a military officer father and journalist mother. From 1980 to 1984 he attended the Secondary School of Visual Arts as a student of the artists Zoltán Tölg-Molnár and István Gábor, the architect György László Sáros, literary aestheticians Zsuzsa Pál and Ágnes Ék, and the history professor Dr. Péter Kőszeghy. He continued his studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts from 1985 to 1989, Department of Painting. He was a student of the masters Ignác Kokas, and later Gábor Dienes. In 1987 he was invited by Layota Art AB to paint in Sweden, and exhibited his work in Stockholm. In the autumn of 1987 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie de La Rochefoucauld in Paris, where his mentor and master, Victor Vasarely gave the opening speech. In 1992 he graduated with distinction from the three-year master's course at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, while at the same time completing his studies in philosophy and sociology at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University.

Painting
In the second half of the 1980s, Városi’s painting moved towards abstraction, using tachisme, stain painting and action painting, simultaneously combining geometric forms with lyrical elements. These lyrical abstract paintings using mixed techniques attracted the attention of Victor Vasarely, the world-famous father of Op-Art, who invited the young painter to become his student. After a scholarship in Sweden, he made his debut in Paris in a highly successful solo exhibition opened by Victor Vasarely. In the decade following the of the old master's retirement Városi turned increasingly to abstract encaustic technique.

In 2019, Városi returned to art after an almost twenty-year hiatus and began creating new, abstract expressionist works during the pandemic lockdown. The paintings, created with his new technique are layered and partly three-dimensional. They are artworks based on psychic automatism, in the spirit of the new Pop Art - painted and printed by hand, and also partly created digitally.

Buildings, "Habitable scluptures"
Városi has for many years been involved in photography, sculpture, and architectural design, where he is best known for his "habitable sculptures". The most famous of these is the Poet's Garden Villa Park and Gallery, a residential complex and avant-garde, habitable sculpture built around a statue park, a Zen garden and an exhibition space where architecture, sculpture, and painting are reinforced in a revolutionary complex 3D composition.undefined