Károly Elekes was born in Cristuru Secuiesc/Székelykeresztúr in 1951. Coming from a rural region, an important moment in his artistic development arrived when, at 14, his older brother – who would grow up to be a journalist – would give the young Károly his first camera. Armed with this first tool, the artist-to-be would train his eye. A year later, he enrolled at the Secondary School for Music and Fine Arts in Târgu Mureş/Marosvásárhely, encountered his first masters and influences, such as Pál Nagy.
A product of the Ion Andreescu Institute of Fine Arts (today the University of Art and Design) in Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár (1971-1975), the artist is revered for the support he gave to the Romanian art scene via his contributions to the MAMŰ Atelier (1979-1984). The association, mainly centred around the Apollo Gallery and the Studio Theatre, helped artists who fled Romania for Hungary (a journey Elekes undertook himself in 1984). Indeed, faced with a repressive climate prohibiting free self-expression, MAMŰ went on to dissolve itself with a resounding ‘self-liquidation ceremony’ in September 1983.
Freed in more ways than one following the group’s dissolution and his subsequent move to Hungary, Elekes travelled (Italy, the United States), created, collaborated, and founded a new group, the Pantenon Group (1990-1993), alongside Árpád Nagy and Sándor Krizbai. This period marked the beginning of his cultural recognition, his first commissioned projects and prizes, such as the Munkácsy Prize in 1997.
The MAMŰ years were formative. Elekes embraced an avant-garde mindset with a postmodernist approach, defining his style by borrowing from the aesthetic lessons of his predecessors. Surrealism, conceptualism, pop art, abstraction and a penchant for landscape all find their way into the artist’s production. Sensitive to the embeddedness of art in nature and vice versa, the artist initially strove to promote land art as a means of dialogue and collaboration, an initiative that allowed him to travel extensively and develop a large network. Though his relationship to nature has matured in his practice, it remains a fundamental feature of his oeuvre. His later works seek to renew, through personal alterations, established artistic imagery or unknown pieces from amateur painters to free them from the prisons of museum institutions and anonymity, in which most works are ‘dying’.
