VIDEO: Acton's CAI Host NY Artist, Steven Balogh

The piece below was sent to Acton Patch by Contemporary Arts International:

Steven Balogh, 58, who was a well-known painter in Hungary, immigrated to the U.S. in 1986 after spending seven months in an Austrian refuge camp. “Passions” features several painting done by Balogh in Hungary in the 1980s, recent abstract paintings, and multimedia pieces inspired by his twenty-year-old daughter, Lily Balogh, an emerging ballerina.

Balogh now works as a jewelry designer and model maker in New York City. He studied art as a child in Budapest. In the early 1980s, along with Viktor Lois, artistic director of CAI, Balogh was part of the Hungarian VLS Studio, a group of underground artists. Before the communism fell there in 1989, the government censored much of Balogh’s work.

The names of Balogh’s paintings in “Passions” from his rebellious youth – the Loser, Dialogue, The Kiss, and Masochist – reflect the intensity of his emotions. Balogh said, “My painting the Masochist is about my whole generation. We were unhappy and self destructive … it felt like they were hurting ourselves by drinking and smoking a lot.” He continued, “Almost everyone is dead from my generation.” Showing pain, red is a recurring color in Balogh’s raw expressive images. Balogh said, “Art critics have had a hard time classifying my early work.”

Balogh’s recent paintings are large in scale, abstract in design, and many are diptychs and triptych. Balogh squeezes mostly acrylic paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, and uses his hands to tweak the images. Squatting down near the floor, Balogh performs a type of dance as he releases his emotions on to the canvas. In “Ciccolina Introducing Porn to an Ancient Tribe in the Amazon,” Balogh uses pink and orange swirls to express the rawness and humor of Ciccolina, Jeff Koons’ former wife, who was the most famous porn star in Hungary before marrying Koons and, at one time, was elected as a member of the Italian Parliament.

“Passions” also includes a series of mixed media pieces in which Balogh carved a space in an old Encyclopedia Britannica. One piece, called Book-Blade, contains triangles of surgical steel. Another, Book-Egg, reveals an egg under a mesh.

Balogh’s daughter Lily, who just finished a coveted apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet and is now a soloist with Ballet Next, provides him with a supply of worn ballet slippers. Balogh fills some of these with sharp objects, and attaches them to a painted canvas. Perhaps he is reflecting on the years of hard work and physical effort that it’s taken for his daughter to get to her current state.

Balogh said, “One morning I got up and was angry about something. I can transfer my anger and emotion to the canvas.” It is clear from the exhibit “Passions,” that his art is an outlet for Balogh. He added,  “Every one of my paintings expresses different emotions.”

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