Márta Bada
Painter, winner of the Balázs János Prize
Márta Bada was born on February 25th, 1951, in Erdőtarcsa, in a Roma family with five children.
She has lived in Gödöllő since her early childhood. All her life she has done manual work to support herself and her children. She has been painting on a regular basis since 1973. The audience could first see her art in 1979 at a group exhibition. Since then, she has had dozens of individual exhibitions all over the country, and her work has been shown in several cities around the world, including Vienna, Paris and Tampere.
Throughout her career, she has nurtured a close relationship with other Roma artists and Roma intellectuals – Menyhért Lakatos, Tamás Péli, Mara Oláh – and they have mutually influenced each other’s work.
Her masters: Iván Remsey, Pál Mizser, Lilla László, Erzsébet Szekeres. Her colourful, impressionistic pictures depict the Gödöllő landscape, the Roma living there and the world of Roma fairy tales. Her works can be found in the Roma Parliament in Hungary, in the Hungarian Institute of Culture, at the Museum Ethnography of Budapest and that of Frankfurt, in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Gödöllő and at the Vatican.
She has received several prizes and awards for her art, but she is the proudest of the Balázs János Prize she received in 2005.
The paintings at this exhibition come from the painter, Márta Bada, as well as the collection of the Romano Kher Budapest Roma Cultural Centre and the collection of the Museum of Ethnography.
