About Béla

Béla Horvat-Morvai is Hungarian. Born in 1953, his cradle is the Hungarian great plain, his nanny’s arms are the rivers Danube and Tisza. They, his Dachshund, and his goat taught him unity with nature and the ability to perceive all that surrounds us with inquisitive, wide-open eyes, which he went on to develop to the highest level in his art.

Béla discovered his love for the arts as a child in the post office. In those days already ballpoint pens have become popular, but in the post office of his little town there was still a fountain pen and ink made available for the public. Writing with it the first time, he immediately realized how sensitive an instrument a fountain pen is, and from then on he would not touch a ballpoint any more. He recalls: his use of the fountain pen and ink have converted smearing into drawing, and later into calligraphy. The brushwork of his paintings is based on calligraphy.

His interest in drawing led to the desire to paint. As a teenager, he visited several local painters trying to learn from them how to manufacture paint the traditional way. He was shocked to learn that they all use off the shelve paint. So he researched the topic in libraries, and started to reproduce traditional paints from basic ingredients, and then went on to experiment creating his own recipes. This interest in the basic properties of paints led to his sensitivity towards the implementation of color, texture, and luminescence.

In the year 1978, Bela enrolled studies of fine arts at the Kunstakademie, Duesseldorf, in then West Germany, from where he graduated as “Kunst Mahler” (fine artist) in 1982. He selected as his mentor the world renowned painter Gotthard Graupner because of his interest in, and sensitivity for colors. Graupner’s artistic expression focused on non-figurative color space bodies. Other eminent German painters taught him at the academy Richter, Anatoli, and Klapek. These teachers primed in him the awareness and quest for perfection. Why is it that a painting can look great to an artist when it just has been finished but appears mediocre the next day? Why can one get tired of and saturated by a piece of art? What makes a painting consistently great? How can one create this stability without the painter deceiving himself, and others? Since his studies, Bela has made the strength and honesty of the paintbrush the maximum of his work.

Bela remained an outdoor person, and also his artistic interest continued to focus on Nature, Humans, and Color. He developed his own style of Perceptionism. It is based on the realization that it takes conscious human perception for anything to become meaningful. The beauty of nature, of human relations, of physical and metaphysical reality, exists only as we humans perceive it. And only through human reflection does it develop color and texture. Béla’s paintings capture the color and texture of his perceptions.

Béla currently resides in Germany with his wife and two children and has had several exhibitions across Europe, the US, and Japan.