István Szentandrássy is the only disciple of Tamas Péli, the prophet of Hungarian Roma art. He is now the leader of what is a school of painting in the classical sense, which Tamás Péli created in the early 1980s, and which still has several young, exceptionally talented followers.

By his own confession, Szentandrássy employs the great Renaissance masters’ bravura technique in works that are modern in subject and reflect on the problems of contemporary society. He finished one of his chief works in 2004. The large canvases, which illustrate Lorca’s Gypsy ballads, represent the quintessence of Roma visual art. They are the artist’s parable for the coming generations of Roma artists and intellectuals: they are a compendium of the iconography of Roma visual culture, and offer a virtuoso combination of the Roma narrative tradition and contemporary Roma literature. These pictures are astonishingly suggestive Roma visions, with charging wild horses, exotic Gypsy princesses, beggars, musicians and fatal romances.

Timea Junghaus

István Szentandrássy
photo: László Szelényi