Urszinyi Mária
Oradea, 1949. Currently lives and works in Oradea.
The Life
The daughter of a pharmacist, Mária Urszinyi had an immense talent for drawing. Although she finished Art School, she didn't follow through with her studies after graduation, choosing another career instead. After some time, she returned to what she loved doing, and that was art. She currently lives and works in Oradea.
The Art
Maria's art falls into the Abstract Expressionism category. She painted, drew, and illustrated the world around her.
First steps towards art
Maria manifested interest in art from an early age, ever since she could hold up a pencil in her father's Pharmacy office, where she would often hide away to draw and temper her restless nature.
She was born in Oradea in 1949, and it was here where she finished her primary school studies.
Growing up, Mária Urszinyi was influenced by the 1960s era. An era that generated an important number of social and political disruptions, which challenged the order of all things. Events like The Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam war would forever influence generations to come. Maria's generation.
She studied art between 1971 and 1975 at the “Ion Andreescu” Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj, under teachers like Miklóssy Gábor and Abodi Nagy Béla. After graduation, she changed her mind about being an artist and turned towards working in other domains, out of the desire to gain as much life experience as possible. The direct contact she had with the working class, reflected later on in her painting and graphics, where she sought to capture the beauty of man, the environment, and the joy of labor.
First steps towards fully living
After letting herself taste the reality of practical life, Maria returned to doing what came most natural to her: art. She rented a studio in Oradea, on Kossuth Street, and started a business with graphics. In the beginning, she could only afford to invest in materials that were more financially accessible than paint and canvas. It all developed rather quickly, and Maria managed to establish herself as an artist, adding expressive paintings and illustrations to her list of "art products". Looking back at this moment in time, the artist confessed: "When I paint, I become ecstatic. When I draw, I'm calm".
Maria portrays her characters as deformed shapes, rejecting the authority of highbrow art by creating her own style. Her art can be considered as being raw, one that feeds the subconscious, one that resembles the art of a child, the art of the sick, even the primitive art. Her artistic models were Van Gogh and Ion Tuculescu. In her recent works, she happily recreated works by Van Gogh, drawing and painting a compulsive immediate environment. In 1988 she organized an extensive retrospective in Oradea. Her works are exhibited in our country, as well as abroad, in Hungary, America, Israel, and Canada.
