Géza Laczák was born in Baja in 1951; when he was two years old, his family moved to Szigetvár. He attended a music-focused primary school, where he studied the violin and seriously contemplated a career in music. In parallel, he took part in a drawing circle and, encouraged by his teachers, continued his education in this direction. In Szigetvár, the castle served as his childhood playground, and he was early captivated by medieval armour, cannonballs, weapons, and banners.
He began his secondary studies in Pécs at the Művészeti Szakközépiskola (Secondary School of Art), specialising in metalwork. In the first year, lettering proved to be a rigorous filter subject under the supervision of a decorative painting teacher. His specialist metalwork instructor, Éva Nádas, did not teach design; instead, students produced copies from various historical periods using traditional techniques. By hammering, they created Roman bowls, Baroque goblets, medieval drinking vessels, Migration Period purse mounts, and repoussé hunting scenes. It was during this period that Géza Laczák acquired the fundamental skills of the craft. A decisive influence on him was the sculptor Sándor Rétfalvi, who taught modelling classes. The high standard of his instruction led Laczák to commit himself for life to an artistic vocation and to a sculptural mode of thinking. The training itself was primarily sculptural in orientation: students modelled in plasticine, clay, and plaster, and the more successful small sculptures were even cast in lead. At this time, Laczák’s interest was also awakened in the relationship between sculpture and architecture, and in the interplay of exterior, interior, and spiritual spaces. On the advice of Éva Nádas, he regularly took his drawings, small sculptures, and plaques to the goldsmith Vladimír Péter, then a student at the Iparművészeti Főiskola (College of Applied Arts), who subjected them to meticulous critique. These visits already served as preparation for admission to the college, where Laczák was accepted at his first attempt in 1970, enrolling in the metalwork programme.
In that year, the entrance examination at the College of Applied Arts consisted of modelling a head, drawing a head, and chasing. He benefited greatly from the preliminary preparation undertaken with Vladimír Péter, since he had not been taught the design of goldsmiths’ objects, and a sculptural approach, in itself, was not a practical route to success. His principal master was József Engelsz, from whom he received a rigorous education in form culture. The rector of the college was the architect and art historian Frigyes Pogány; his drawing teachers were the painters Pál Gerzson and István Csík; his specialist instructor was the goldsmith József Pölöskei; and his sculpture teacher was Gyula Illés. Goldsmithing was taught through semester-long design-and-make assignments: producing a bowl, a badge, a vase, a spatial sculpture, a set, and jewellery. Designing continued until the master deemed the plan feasible for execution; only then did students receive raw material, tools, and instruments. A well-equipped soldering workshop and machine shop were available under the supervision of specialist instructors. The final design outcome had to be unambiguous and clearly legible, since alterations during execution were not possible. The exclusion of overruns and unfinished work trained students in self-discipline. One year was allotted for the diploma piece. Students were required to find sites for the fictive presentation of their plans. Dimensions were determined by the college’s financial means and the time available. Géza Laczák selected one side wall of the foyer of the Fővárosi Nagycirkusz (Metropolitan Circus) in Budapest, for which he designed a circus-themed relief measuring 80 × 200 cm. He executed his diploma work in soldered polished brass sheet with fired-enamel inlays. The relief evokes not only the circus itself but also the ambience of the surrounding City Park and amusement park. Its formal vocabulary, geometrically articulated, is built from abstracted carousel motifs, pinwheels, mirror-glazed gingerbread ornaments, and elements of musical instruments. The chromatic range of the enamelled components conveys the brash exuberance of the fairground.
As an early-career artist, he looked with a certain envy towards his Western counterparts, who had access to far more advanced technical facilities, special alloys, and innovative technologies. The neo-Constructivism associated with Csiky Tibor, the amorphous handling of form characteristic of Henry Moore, and the purified steel-plate sculpture of Bohus Zoltán exerted a decisive influence on Laczák Géza, who graduated in 1975. After completing his studies, he became a member of the Művészeti Alap (Art Fund). Until the age of thirty, he was admitted to the Fiatal Képzőművészek Stúdiója (Studio of Young Fine Artists), and until the age of thirty-five to the Fiatal Iparművészek Stúdiója Egyesület (Association of the Studio of Young Applied Artists). Following the success of the First Goldsmith and Metal Art Quadrennial in Miskolc, he was elected a member of the Magyar Képző- és Iparművészek Szövetsége (Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists) in 1977. In the second half of the 1970s, the compensatory role played by goldsmiths and metal artists within the construction industry was still in effect, and the mandatory two-per-thousand allocation for art financing attached to major investments remained in force. During this period, he produced inscriptions, interior fittings, gates, and shop signs. Commissions for unique pieces or small series objects were provided by the Képcsarnok (State Gallery Company) and the Iparművészeti Vállalat (Applied Arts Company). The Iparművészeti Vállalat maintained its own production workshops, which, albeit in limited numbers, required designs and prototypes. Genuine professional success, however, could be achieved primarily through carefully executed, individually crafted objects produced in one’s own studio. Hardly had the ink dried on his diploma when the organising office of Hungexpo commissioned Laczák Géza to design the awards of the Budapesti Nemzetközi Vásár (Budapest International Fair). Over a six-year period, twice annually in spring and autumn, he produced six to eight Grand Prizes and nearly fifty Fair Prizes each year. This work occupied almost all of his time, as the same emblem was required to be redesigned annually. These awards took the form of non-figurative small sculptures, approximately 30 cm and 15 cm in height, conceived in a Constructivist idiom. He was later entrusted with the creation of awards for various specialised trade fairs as well. During this period, the almost obligatory decorative approach characteristic of his college training gradually transformed into an essentialised, radically purified formal language.
In 1987, he completed the three-metre-high brass Óraplasztika (lit. Clock Sculpture) for the Gyakorló úti Közgazdasági Szakközépiskola (Secondary School of Economics on Gyakorló Street) in Budapest’s District X. Intersecting cylinders arranged along perpendicular axes support the clock face positioned at the geometric centre, which is connected to a custom-made digital clock mechanism. The termini of the smaller, horizontally oriented cylinder take the form of divided hemispheres, a formally acoustic allusion to the clock’s function of regulating the school bell system.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he began experimenting with materials, developing processes that combined the thermal deformation of copper sheet with form-shaping in stainless steel achieved through silver soldering, as well as with the interaction between these two techniques. In essence, the crumpled copper sheet is set in deliberate counterpoint to taut, polished, mirror-like steel surfaces. He has consistently applied this contrast across all genres of his work. A distinctive feature of his oeuvre is a particular mode of colouring, termed “chrome patina” by Géza Laczák. As a result of overheating, silver or brass sheets buckle and crease, producing richly varied surface textures. By placing a hemispherical form of bronze or iron, metals with a higher melting point, beneath the sheet and heating it until the silver or brass becomes plastic, the material is allowed to sink under its own weight onto the hemisphere below. The effects of flame-induced metal colouring were rendered predictable by subjecting polished, nickel-plated, or chrome-plated sheets to controlled heat treatment.
In 1992 he received a commission from the Soproni Szent Erzsébet Kórház (St Elizabeth Hospital, Sopron) for a one-metre copper lightning-conductor sphere, conceived by the architect as a structure composed of vertical segments. Géza Laczák, however, recessed the central element and executed it in stainless steel; the resulting form, reminiscent of a dividing cell, prompted a shift in the work’s function. Consequently, it was relocated to the parapet of the terrace above the entrance and assumed the role of a sign. What had begun as an applied functional object thus became a spatial sculpture alluding to the building’s medical purpose.
After the regime change, the Magyar Külkereskedelmi Bank (Hungarian Bank for Foreign Trade), together with other financial institutions, embarked on the development of a nationwide branch network. For a decade, Géza Laczák supplied numerous bank branches with lamps, signage, gates, umbrella stands, ashtrays, railings, and other fittings. These objects, however, were discarded at the time of subsequent refurbishments, as the well-capitalised bank consistently pursued ever-new design concepts.
In 2006, with the support of the Nemzeti Kulturális Alap (National Cultural Fund), Géza Laczák created the 3.14-metre-high wall sculpture ÍR–ÁS (lit. Writing–Inscription) for the public entrance hall of the Central Building of the Fővárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár (Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library), Budapest. The commission aimed at the creation of a monument to the history of writing, intended to demonstrate the formative impact of literacy on the development of humanity. During his preparatory research, Laczák was deeply influenced by the compelling history of the Rosetta Stone. He reproduced it at original scale on copper sheet by acid etching, then subjected the surface to a metal-crumpling process, carried to the point at which the original text remains only barely legible. This treated surface forms the background for a stainless-steel cube, mounted to rotate on one of its vertices, on the three outward-facing sides of which he etched the musical score of Béla Bartók’s Cantata Profana, the manuscript of Ferenc Kölcsey’s Himnusz (lit. Hymn), and the diagram of Farkas Bolyai’s theorem on central and circumferential triangles. Music, poetry, and geometric construction appear here as refined manifestations of writing, collectively pointing to the potentialities inherent in the development of human culture. The rotating, polished steel cube functions as a positive element set against the crumpled, scorched, and chromatically treated negative background.
In 2010, Géza Laczák created the stainless-steel work entitled Szökőkút és borkút (lit. Fountain and Wine Fountain) for the Mediterranean-style courtyard of the Szentendrei Műhely Galéria (Szentendre Workshop Gallery). The installation operates with three pumps driving a closed-loop water circulation system, requiring replenishment only for losses caused by evaporation. Its basin conceals a one-hundred-litre water reservoir and incorporates octagonal water receivers of varying heights, to which a mobile wine fountain is attached. The fountain is capped by a small perforated canopy, from which the water flows back into the basin. The stainless-steel structure integrates limestone slabs aligned with the courtyard’s stone paving. Laczák designed the entire mechanical system of the work himself. Alongside commissioned projects, he consistently sought time for what might appear to be autonomous formal experiments, as the inexhaustible technical possibilities of metal continually prompted him toward the articulation of new contents. From these explorations emerged the various spatial forms characteristic of his oeuvre, which often mature within the artist over the course of many years.
After graduating from the college, he abandoned the decorative style and began working in the neo-constructivist idiom closer to his temperament, in a manner comparable to Tibor Csiky, Zoltán Bohus, and Mária Lugossy. In terms of materials, he likewise sought to shift from copper to steel, although acquiring such materials through the domestic trade of the period was far from straightforward.
From the early 1990s onwards, material and technology ceased to be ends in themselves and became merely the means by which his objects were realised. Laczák Géza turned towards older genres, seeking to invest them with new contents and new forms. He maintains that the bowl, the box, and the vase are not obsolete genres; rather, they are too often deployed in outdated ways. Since these objects have been in use for millennia, it is worth reconsidering, beyond the criterion of usability, the altered nature of function in the present.
Given the character of his commissions, he now produces almost exclusively non-figurative objects. Yet the sphere, the cube, the pyramid, the cone, and other geometric forms are, in his hands, subtly personified, coming to bear distinct gestures of their own.
[2016]