Károly Elekes
Károly Elekes belongs to a generation of artists who emerged from the multicultural, multilingual society and relatively liberal political climate of socialist Romania—which then changed radically around 1976. He was born to a Hungarian family in Transylvania, a part of the country with a strong painterly tradition and intensely nature-tinged definitions of identity, a region also isolated in some ways as well as less receptive to experimental artistic approaches. In light of this, nature-referencing artistic trends and discourses initiated in the West could hardly be adapted to the specific local
conditions. Moreover, the landscape transformations and land art actions of Elekes and his colleagues proceeded according to a semantic modus operandi that also set them apart from other Eastern European artistic interventions of that period. After finishing his studies, Elekes took a two-year obligatory job at a graphic institute in Bucharest, which proved to be a defining experience for him in terms of the language and friendships associated with experimental art. Inspired by his experiences of the experimental art being created in the Romanian capital, Elekes and several other emerging young artists settled down in Tîrgu Mureș (Hungarian: Marosvásárhely) in 1977. Out of an ambition to connect local fellow artists with the experimental circles in Bucharest as well as organize joint exhibitions, he initiated and founded the MAMŰ Group in 1978. Members of MAMŰ joined forces with local writers, amateur filmmakers, actors, philosophers, and photographers to form a strong network of intellectual friendships that became all the more important after they were deprived of their institutions for political reasons. Having lost their exhibition space, they searched for alternatives situated in the natural environment surrounding the city, where they began cooperating with each other and with nature itself instead of transforming it. The very special atmosphere of their landscape actions is owed to this cooperative agenda featuring the group’s non-transformative and nevertheless reflective, poetic, and metaphysical approach to the environment, for which they showed great respect. E.Kü.
more