Gyula Várnai
Born in Kazincbarcika, 1956 and lives in Dunaújváros, Hungary
Gyula Várnai is one of the most prominent representatives of a generation of Hungarian artists who started their careers in the late eighties. Without official art training, he acquired art techniques in the free school functioning in his hometown. Beyond this, he studied printing, mathematics, and physics, and he was occupied with astronomy and music, and the multilayered knowledge accumulated in this way all influenced the development of his artistic approach. The unfolding of his art coincides with the Neo-Conceptual tendencies that speared in the early 1990s in Hungary. Várnai’s light and sound installations made at this time were the playful realisations of the diversity of material and immaterial phenomena. From the early 2000s, besides his large format installations, he produced more works in the panel picture format – lightboxes, prints of various techniques, or collages. His works can be found in private and public collections such as the Hungarian National Gallery, the Ludwig Museum Budapest and the Insitute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros, Hungary.