Barnabás Lakatos Gelléri
About the artist
Barnabás Lakatos Gelléri (1997) succeeded in developing the sensuous – simultaneously symbolist and expressive – figurality that is now regarded as his trademark before he graduated from Eszter Radák's painting class at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Although Lakatos Gelléri defines himself as an artist, who mixes 90s kids aesthetics with post-internet painting, his paintings also operate with a characteristically timeless set of symbols. The vibrant and extraordinarily colourful compositions of the artist’s most recent cycle are populated by personified animals known from fairy tales, animated films, myths and the Bible, entangled in the jungle-like flora of the paintings. Barnabás Lakatos Gelléri's figures are ancient, universal symbols deeply embedded in our culture, which, in addition to a kind of private-mythological reading, can also be considered through the lens of several other interpretative frameworks. What is more, the young artist employs increasingly radical, free and relaxed techniques of gestural painting for shaping figures in his latest canvases, which feature the fragments of the most-well known Hungarian myth, the tale of the Miraculous Deer, who led, the nomadic brothers to the West.
