TAMÁS PÉLI was born on August 7th, 1948, in Budapest. At the age of three, he already drew marvelous pictures, he kept winning drawing competitions from elementary school and started working with oil paint at the age of 11. He studied art at the Secondary School of Visual Arts (1962-67) and at the Murals Department of the Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands (1968-73). Between 1973 and 1978, he participated in the application works of the glass panes depicting scenes from the Old and the New Testament in the chapel of the Amsterdam Saint Luke’s and Andrew’s Hospital, as well as the paintings and wooden and metal sculptures of Spar Bank van ser Stadt. His graduation piece, which can be found in the Romanesque chapel of the Amsterdam Cultural Center, received the first prize at an arts competition organized by the Amsterdam City Council. His most significant large-size work is the nearly 50 m2 panel on the wall of the Royal Academy of Art of the Netherlands. From 1970, his works were exhibited at prestigious galleries in Amsterdam. His paintings tried to capture the fate of the Roma people.
György Kerekes played an important role in getting Tamás Péli to create his 9 x 4.5-meter panel called Birth in the library room of the former Andrássy mansion, now orphanage, in Tiszadob. This panel depicts the history of the Roma in Hungary, starting from their origins.
During a video discussion, this is what Tamás Péli said about being Roma:
“I was born in 1948 in the 8th district of Budapest, which is said to be the Roma district of the city. My most important and most fantastic memory is a marvelous community that surrounded me and where I desperately wanted to and still want to belong. I was three or four years old – at the time I still had platinum-blond hair – and I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap, who was a wonderful, 117-kg Indian goddess. I asked her: ‘am I also like you?’ Because I had realized, looking at my reflection in puddles and other places, that I looked different from her other grandchildren. She answered: ‘Well, my boy, you’re exactly like us.’ This was the decisive moment of my life. I love these people, whom I will name now: the Roma. I started secondary school in 1962. I decided to study, so that, with God’s help, I could be a painter and help my people from another position against the world and society, which didn’t like us then and still doesn’t”, he said in one of his last interviews.
Relying on Renaissance and Baroque traditions, he created his own unique visual imagery, figurative art that elevates the destiny problems of Roma people to symbolic heights. He was the first one to visualize the historic path of the Roma as a people in a monumental form.
He was best at painting portraits. Besides painting, he also shaped Hungarian cultural and political life as a writer and public figure, in 1993 he became a Member of Parliament for the Hungarian Socialist Party. He died in Budapest in November 22, 1994.
Events:
2022. 12. 29. Finissage - In memoriam Tamás Péli
