Bálint Szombathy is a multimedia artist, art historiographer, literary writer, editor and researcher of beauty. He is one of the founding members of the Bosch+Bosch Group.
In 1970, he made his first drawings representing the ball’s path by tracing television broadcasts of soccer games – Footballogram, 1971. In the 1980s, he introduced the medium of phototelegraphy (wire-photo) in visual arts.
The main characteristics of his ample and continuously growing oeuvre are intermediality and the combination of genres. The fundamental elements of Szombathy’s activity are its referentiality to the poetic experimentalism of the classical avant-garde and the endorsement of the critical attitude of activism. The significance of activism and ideological criticism in his works was already visible in his two anti-war actions in 1968; however, it was not until the early 1970s that he began to pursue activities exhibiting systematically subversive thought. The first instance of using ideological symbols and objects was in his outdoor action Flags in 1971, which also marked the beginning of the intensive involvement of photography in his creative process.
His two emblematic series were conceived immediately after Flags. His photo performance Bauhaus from 1972 symbolically placed one of the pivotal institutions of the avant-garde into his personal living space. As opposed to this, Lenin in Budapest focused on the Hungarian context. Due to its public nature, this action raised utterly different questions, revisiting the 1956 revolution and subsequent Soviet intervention or the events of 1968.