Györgyi Lantos was born in Hódmezővásárhely in 1953. She studied at the Magyar Képzőművészeti Főiskola (today the Hungarian University of Fine Arts) in Budapest (1971-1976), where she met her future husband and creative partner Istvan Máté.
With both coming from humble beginnings as the children of rural tradespeople, they embraced a typically Hungarian philosophy of neutrality. Indeed, while struggles were being waged in the fine arts both in Hungary and Europe not only between ‘isms’, styles and trends, but also between people and groups in the decades around the turn of the millennium, Lantos stayed committed to the motto: ‘discretion is the better part of valour’. Both she and her husband followed their own course, while still managing to stay relevant and producing contextually meaningful art.
In her work two aspects are closely and inextricably intertwined: a noble intention to show something, which is very much characteristic of the internal development of Hungarian sculpture, and the great, life-centric, stylising, symbolic traditions of European art from the Greeks and Romans through the Renaissance and up to the present day: Rodin, Strobl, Meštrović, Meggyesy and Manzù, to name but a few.
Tradition always appears in an adequate form, in a delicate balance with modernity, which is enriched with a sovereign use of the artistic practices and her own ideas. She is not lost in the jungle of formal innovations. Her art is an integral and organic part of the mainstream of art history. Her best pieces of art carry the great ethos of European culture. When evoking contemporary issues, whether artistic or societal, the answer Lantos proposes always seems to draw on classical knowledge.
