SÁNDOR PINCZEHELYI

Sándor Pinczehelyi (1946, Szigetvár) is a Hungarian multimedia artist. As one of the participants of the Pécs Workshop in the early ’70s, he contributed to the continuity and development of Hungarian geometric abstraction with his analytical and conceptual works and land art projects that included documenting and interpreting of changes and processes in time. At the same time he developed his own exploration poetics by creating the new iconography and system of political and historical emblems, conceiving his art works as a personal, socially determined individual mythology. His definition of the personal position within the historical and cultural reality of Central and Eastern Europe, Pinczehelyi contextualises by focusing on the motifs of star, hammer, sickle and granite cobblestone – all famous symbols of the international workers’ movement – as well as the Hungarian tricolour, all of which evidently have the specific and historically defined local meanings that inspire sensitive and ambiguous political and historical associations. Pinczehelyi’s procedure of appropriation and reinterpretation or changing of the inherent semantic structure of the generally known political iconography through their reconstruction within the particular, everyday objects (political pop art), gives them more often than not a new and ironic or even entirely opposite significance. By connecting them with the artist’s figure into the indivisible union of form as in the iconic photograph Hammer and sickle (1973), all determinants of the political pop art are overcome. Here all political, social and historical references, permeated with the personal experience, merge into the specific regional mythology, where the character of artist stands as a historical, social and authentic individual.