LÁSZLÓ SZALMA

László Szalma was born in 1949 in Subotica (Vojvodina, Serbia), where he passed away in 2005.

He was a visual and graphic artist and a founding member of the Bosch+Bosch Group. 

He graduated in 1967 from secondary school of graphic printing in Subotica, where he studied zincography. He started working at the local division of the Yugoslav Railways Press. In the early ’70s, he worked on the staff of the Jelen youth journal, and from 1975 he worked as the graphic editor of the 7 Nap weekly for two decades.

Starting with his participation in the founding of the Bosch+Bosch Group, more and more of his works became based on intervention and action, while retaining their typographical aspects. In the first half of the 1970s, his work was dominated by the use of photography.

The mentality of Bosch+Bosch strongly inspired Szalma to develop his ideas of spatial interventions. One of his most well-known such actions was the Hommage to Dada series realized in 1972, during which Szalma implanted a black piece of cloth bearing the script "DADA" into various nooks and crannies of public space. Besides the apparent associations of a historically distant intellectual and artistic heritage, these photos also constituted as a direct reference to the rediscovered legacy of the Dadaist matinees of Subotica. Hommage to Dada has become his most conspicuous, emblematic work; his remaining works construct a unique universe less loudly, but all the more consistently. This universe is made up of subtly conceptual and poetic actions that show the influence of Fluxus as well as Szalma’s practice as a graphic printer.

In the first half of the ’70s, he authored several experimental films recording his actions carried out in natural or urban environments.