Bálind István

I was born in Ada, Yugoslavia, in 1953. In 1981 I graduated in painting from the Fine Arts Department of the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. Ten years later I moved to Hungary and now live in Budapest. I am a member of several art societies in the country and abroad. I have attended several international art residencies in: Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Austria and Serbia. I have participated in nearly fifty solo and more than one hundred and fifty group exhibitions. Sometimes I have won awards and study grants.

From the very beginning, my work has been permeated by experimentation and using different, unconventional painting materials. I was interested in the extremes of aesthetic and artistic categories. Besides painting, I have also worked with video and performance. The first major professional success for me was my participation in the international exhibition "Biennale de Paris" in 1982, where I presented a video work. This year has been important for me in other ways too. I discovered plastic foil, which soon became my nearly single material of choice. The nylon is coarse but also sloppy, a lifeless product of civilization, which I stretched over the frame instead of canvas; perforated, cut into strips, melted with an iron or burnt with a gas gun. My nylon paintings were awarded a painting prize by the Association of Fine Arts of Vojvodina in 1983. In 1990 I started to use rags instead of black and transparent plastic. At first, with minimal intervention, I made paintings from rags. With these rags I participated in the first Budapest Art Expo, followed by Los Angeles "ART LA '91". Since 1992 I have been creating thematic works from rags and dyed textiles, based on the books of Moses, with sewn and embroidered surfaces. By the end of 1997, I had completed the Books of Moses series and then selected seven drawings from the small, colourful sketches I had previously made on the same theme and enlarged them tenfold. These enlargements were the material for an exhibition I did in 1998. After the exhibition, the media picked up on the work, which prompted me to do the same. With minor changes, but technically improved, I painted this particular image nine times in a row. This started the series "Woman with Dog". I showed these nine identical paintings at an exhibition in Budapest in 1999. Highlighting the dog or the woman, enlarging the details, elongating the female figure resulted in an endless series of variations. A new work was not necessarily a single work; it could be two, four, or even forty identical pictures. The woman and the dog, together or separately, function as a trademark, so their function is to guarantee the originality and quality of the product / in this case, the artwork/, even more than once. The initial, predominant colours of gold and red were accompanied by a composition based on the rules of gold etching. Later I changed a lot. I used tighter and then more playful compositions, glossy and matt blacks, or even bright colours, blue, red, and green. The last pieces of the series were made in 2008, these are the varicoloured - striped pictures. In the summer of that year, I held an exhibition of the Dog Woman material entitled "Final Sale", which brought this period to an end.

I then replaced the clichéd motif of the dog with my favourite theme from college, the tree. The space and medium in which I placed the tree was complemented by a sky, "inspired" by sunsets uploaded by anyone to the internet. The tree, like the dog before, appears without detail, as a shape immediately recognisable by all, mostly as a black spot in a geometric space reminiscent of human constructions. Later on, I abandoned the romantic sunsets and increasingly placed the spots and holes in the shape of the tree in a simplified medium of pure colours and surfaces. A large-scale exhibition of wood in Niš, Serbia, and in my hometown Ada in 2014, and then in Novi Vinodolski, Croatia in 2018, was the end and the beginning of the dog's "encounter" with wood. For, by then, I had already adapted the dog's lower body to the former dog head and upper body, which I still use today in my series Dog World. In these newer dog pictures, the tree also makes an occasional appearance, but it is mainly the dog that dominates.

Solo exhibitions:

• Homage to László Moholy-Nagy (mixed media) – Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 1981
• István Bálind (drawings) – Galerija Jadroagent, Rijeka, Croatia, 1982
• Shrine (installation) – Galerija ULUV, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 1985
• Homage to Sándor Lukács (installation, performance: Horoscope, video: Via Crucis) – Bácstopolya, Yugoslavia, 1989
• Burned images (installation) – Csongrád County Library, Szeged, 1990
• Burned images (installation, video: Via Crucis) – Ifjúsági Ház Gallery, Szeged, 1990
• Rag pictures (paintings) – Boston Gallery, Ada, Yugoslavia, 1990
• Rag pictures (paintings) – Budapest Gallery, Budapest, 1992
• Rag pictures (paintings) – Ifjúsági Ház Gallery, Szeged, 1992
• Collection exhibition (paintings) - Bibliotheka Universalis – Selye - Szabó Foundation, Szentes, 1994
• HET - Book of Moses (paintings) – Ifjúsági Ház Gallery, Szeged, 1997
• Book of Moses (paintings) – Horda Gallery, Pécs, 1998
• Book of Moses (enlargements) – Vizivárosi Gallery, Budapest, 1998
• Book of Moses (monumental miniatures) – City Museum, Zenta, Yugoslavia, 1998
• Woman with dog; one-nine (paintings) – Vigadó Gallery, Budapest, 1999
• Woman without dog 4+5 (paintings) – EveArt Gallery, Budapest, 2000
• Dog without woman 4+5 (paintings) – Paris-Texas Café, Budapest, 2000
• Woman with dog; one-nine (paintings) – Galerija Kortil, Rijeka, Croatia, 2000
• Woman with and without dog – Erlin Gallery, Budapest, 2001
• Dog, dog woman, without woman in the open air (paintings) – Sir William Pub, Budapest, 2001
• Woman with and without a dog – Jászai Mari Theatre, Népház Gallery, Tatabánya, 2002
• Woman with dog - a pure symbol (paintings) – Budapest Gallery Exhibition Hall, Budapest, 2002
• Woman with dog (paintings) – European University Exhibition Hall, Budapest, 2002
• Woman with dog 3+3 (paintings) – Costes Café, Budapest, 2003
• Dog without woman, forty times (paintings) – Galerija BelArt, Novi Sad, SCG, 2003
• Bálind - Yengibarian joint exhibition (paintings-sculptures) – Martino Gallery, Budapest, 2003
• Woman with Dog (1999-2008) – Arte Gallery and Auction House, Budapest, 2008
• Woman with Dog (1999-2008) – Kosovelov Dom, Sežana, Slovenia
• 36 trees – Arte Gallery and Auction Office, Budapest, 2010
• TÁJ-KÉP-MÁS-KÉP (paintings), István Bálind - Dečov Pal joint exhibition –József Attila Klub Gallery, Budapest, 2010
• Bálind, Butković, Dečov – Galerija ULUV, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2011
• 112 Träd, István Bálind – Galleri Cosmopolitan, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2011
• 338 stablo – Galerija "Laza Kostić" Sombor, Serbia, 2011
• 338 stablo – Galerija Kulturnog centra Vrbas, Vrbas, Serbia, 2011
• Trees - Dogs – Arcadia Gallery, Budapest, 2012
• International tree school – Arte Gallery and Auction House, Budapest, 2012
• István Balind - Dečov Pal – Galerija Srbija, Niš, Serbia, 2014
• Tree - cloud – Galerija Kulturnog centra, Ada, Serbia, 2014
• István Bálind - Dečov Pal - Jandrić Radovan –Mali Likovni Salon, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2016
• Crossroads – Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2016
• Fresh Works – Arte Gallery and Auction House, Budapest, 2017
• István Bálind – Galerija TURNAC, Novi Vinodolski, Croatia, 2018
• A dog on the road – Arte Gallery and Auction House, Budapest, 2019
• Woman with dog and football ball – Eötvös 10 Community and Cultural House, Budapest, 2020

Selected group exhibitions:

• Youth '82 (nylon pictures, installation) – Galerija Matice Srpske, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 1982
• Youth Biennale (video) – Biennale de Paris, Paris, France, 1982
• Biennale of Young Artists (performance "Untitled") – Moderna Galerija, Rijeka, Croatia, 1983
• Alternativa NS'83 (installation, performance "Transformation") – Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 1983
• Biennale of Young Artists (video) – Moderna Galerija, Rijeka, Croatia, 1985
• Veče performansa, (performance "Bird") – Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 1985
• Art and Morality (installation) – Galerija Likovni Jesen, Zombor, Yugoslavia, 1988
• Budapest Art Expo (paintings) – Budapest, 1991
• ART LA '91 (paintings) – Los Angeles, USA, 1991
• Exhibition of participants of the International Artists' Colony (paintings, performance "Black and White") – Municipal Gallery, Riesa, Germany, 1992
• Dialogue - Painting at the millennium – Kunsthalle, Budapest, 2000
• Black and White – Kunsthalle, Budapest, 2001
• 15th International Drawing Triennial – Moderna Galerija, Rijeka, Croatia, 2001
• Künstlerbegegnungen, Budapest Gallery and scholarship holders from the Kunststiftung Stuttgart – Kulturinstitut Ungarn, Stuttgart, Germany, 2002
• Mostra internazionale di Arte Sacra – Salone della foresteria Abbaziale di Santa Maria di Sesto, Sesto al Reghena, Italia, 2002
• IX. Bijenale akvarela –Salon Narodnog Muzeja, Zrenjanin, Szerbia, 2011
• Art without borders – Magyar Műhely Gallery, Budapest, 2022
• Umetnost bez granice – Muzej Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2023

Awards, scholarships:

• Miklós Bíró Prize – TAKT, Yugoslavia, 1981
• Painting Award – Association of Fine Arts of Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, 1983
• Purchase Prize – Budapest Art Expo, Budapest, 1991
• Illyés Foundation Scholarship – Budapest, 1992
• Eötvös Foundation Scholarship – Budapest, 1993
• Westárlat II. Prize – Budapest, 2000
• Study Scholarship Stuttgart – Municipality of Budapest, Budapest, 2001
• Study Scholarship – Rijeka, Croatia, Hungarian Scholarship Committee, Budapest, 2006
• 3rd Serbian Drawing Biennial (1st prize) – Pančova, Serbia, 2011