Péter Lelkes was born into a family of artists, so it was only natural that, after graduating from a secondary school of art, he embarked on an artistic career. His interests, however, remained wide-ranging. He entered the College of Applied Arts in 1962 as a student of porcelain design, before transferring the following year to the industrial design program, from which he graduated in 1967. His teacher, András Dózsa-Farkas, the founder of the program, was himself a sculptor who extended his sculptural practice to the design of functional objects. The principles he upheld and taught – respect for the laws of nature and for human values – also had a decisive influence on Péter Lelkes.
Lelkes began his career as a freelance designer – or, in international terminology, a consulting designer – which gave him the opportunity to work as a co-designer with Dezső Bozzay, a pioneering figure and leading representative of the field, as well as with Sándor Pávai, a former university classmate. At the invitation of an old school friend, he began working for the Budapest Electroacoustic Factory (BEAG), which subsequently became his most important client and remained so until the change of political regime. Within the factory’s principal field of telecommunications technology, he worked primarily on the design of public-address systems and language-teaching equipment – including microphones and loudspeakers. Their continuous technical development and evolution generated a steady stream of industrial design commissions. Among the memorable products from this period are the Stereo Record Players I and II (1975, 1976), with their Plexiglas covers and surface-treated aluminium casings; the headset with boom microphone (1975); the open-back headset with boom microphone (1982); the studio microphone (1972); the spherical microphone (1979), distinguished by its distinctive form; and the interpreting system (1984). All of these are characterised by understated, restrained basic forms and details displaying a refined sculptural sensitivity, and frequently incorporated innovative choices of materials or surface treatments.
The practicality and, at the same time, the success of his designs are demonstrated by the fact that 80 per cent of them were developed into prototypes and 70 per cent went into series production. Moreover, they became widely used: his public-address equipment could be found in a variety of public venues, open-air theatres, churches and the Hungarian Parliament, as well as in Helsinki and Moscow – in the latter case, in the stadiums used for the 1980 Olympic Games.
From the mid-1980s onwards, he also created independent sculptural works, including Színesfém szalagplasztika (Non-Ferrous Metal Strip Sculpture, 1984) for the Csepel Metal Works and Alumínium tárcsaplasztika (Aluminium Disc Sculpture, 1984) for Alutröszt, both of which show affinities with the non-figurative sculptural tendencies of the period.
From the late 1980s, as industrial production declined, his product design commissions became increasingly scarce, prompting him to take on a growing number of graphic design and packaging projects. These included the successful logos created for the Labora Foundation, BEAG and Polaritás (1989–93), the plastic souvenir sundials designed for the ultimately cancelled millecentenary exhibition, and, not least, various oil containers designed for MOL. The plastic containers of different sizes not only became his most successful and most widely produced works – approximately one and a half million of the one-litre oil containers were manufactured – but also ranked among his finest creations. This is particularly true of the five- and ten-litre oil containers (1999), whose striking forms achieve an outstanding harmony between flat and curved surfaces and the distinctive areas of colour provided by their graphic design.
His product designs commissioned by various small companies also won recognition from both the market and the design profession. These included medical laser devices designed for Megalaser Bt. in 1989 and 1990, particularly the laser surgery equipment, as well as Digiton Kft.’s complex ICN 2000 conference system and the logo he designed for the company (1998). His works from the beginning of the new millennium, such as the interactive TV controller for Digiton Kft. (2001) and the liquid analyser designed for Mtech Kft. (2004), demonstrate an increasingly light approach to form, an individual richness of form and, at the same time, a growing purity and simplicity.
Throughout his career as a designer, Lelkes was also active in organising the artistic and professional community, later complementing this work with research, design theory and teaching. These activities became an integral part of his life and, over the years, came to occupy the greater part of his time and energy. From the outset, he believed that practitioners in his field needed to join forces and organise themselves into a professional community. Accordingly, he served as head of the Industrial Design Section of the Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists from 1977 to 1986, and subsequently as vice-president of the Association from 1986 to 1999. In 1976, he was among the founding members of the Zsennye International Design Workshop. He later edited a collection of papers presented at its annual symposia, published in 1996 under the title Zsennye Workshop. Around the time of the political transition, he organised and founded the Hungarian Chamber of Designers (1992) and later organised the highly successful Lépés a jövőbe (Step into the Future) series of exhibitions between 1996 and 2000.
His teaching and research activities developed in close conjunction from 1997 onwards at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He initially taught as an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture, and from 2007 as a private university lecturer at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. In 2004, under the title ArtDesigner, he compiled a collection of retrospective interviews surveying the preceding half-century of Hungarian industrial design, produced in collaboration with the designers themselves. Drawing also on his training as a decorative painter, in 2014 he designed the entire decorative painting scheme for the Roman Catholic Church of Torbágy and took a leading role in its execution. His work is an indispensable document of its era for researchers and the wider reading public alike.
[2014]
Bibliography:
Lelkes design 25 év: Lelkes Péter kiállítása (25 Years of Lelkes Design: An Exhibition by Péter Lelkes). Budapest, Tölgyfa Gallery, 1994. (exhibition catalogue)
Design 94. Ed. István Kulinyi. Budapest, Magyar Design Kulturális Alapítvány [Hungarian Design Cultural Foundation], 1994.
Kortárs magyar művészeti lexikon II. (Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Hungarian Art II). Ed. Péter Fitz. Budapest, Enciklopédia Kiadó, 2000.
Lelkes Péter. Biatorbágy, Lelkes Design Bt., 2005.
Barázdák: Egy kisváros arcvonásai (Furrows: The Features of a Small Town). Eds. Mária Szádváriné Kiss and Tamás Nánási. Biatorbágy, Biatorbágy Ecumenical Cultural Association, 2009.