The first Leopold Bloom Art Award Winner announced

The Award Ceremony of the first Leopold Bloom Art Award took place in Museum Kiscell - Municipal Picture Gallery, on Saturday evening, September 3 2011. Prior to the event the jury of 3 international art professionals visited each shortlisted artist’s studio, in order to get a wider picture of the nominees’ work.

According to their decision, the 2011 Leopold Bloom Art Award went to Róbert Batykó.

Róbert Batykó (born 1981) graduated from the Painting Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest. Batykó owes the subjects of his paintings to serendipity, in that he chances upon the subjects or phenomena that serve as the starting points for his works. His compositions are of objects taken out of their usual environments, showing them in unusual situations and from unexpected viewpoints which often make them unidentifiable. Batykó, in his artistic style combines the traditions of hard edge painting with variously textured painterly surfaces. This kind of delivery confirms the diversity in the subject – an abstract strangeness yet familiarity. While Batykó proceeds to reality, his works are composed using the traditions of uniconic painting, and so the manifest presence of proportions, colors, differently textured surfaces and the variation of paint-materials are hiding the objective, narrative dimensions. Behind the interruption to the process of recognition, it is not hard to notice Batykó's intention to guide the attention to the act of perception itself, which gives a broader referential meaning and background to his method.