The creative drive of the Hungarian artist Peter Zelei origins from 3 primary sources. Firstly the exploration of his own being as a kind of therapy. Secondly, attention - the introverte exhibitionist. The third factor is finance.

an article written by Carmen Line Hust
ARTICULATE #31 | April 2022

The creative drive of the Hungarian artist Peter Zelei (b. 1970), origins from 3 primary sources, in which the order is none-specific. First of all, Zelei is exploring his own being and his work is a kind of therapy, unfolding hidden feelings and stories from his unconscious. Secondly, Zelei is in the urge of getting attention - Zelei is a very introverted person in life, but has the urge to show this slice of his psyche to the world. In terms, we could call him an introverte exhibitionist. The least important factor is finance. As a working artists, living from his images for a long time, it is yet also a factor.

The preferred media of Zelei, at the moment, consists of photography. Beforehand, he also explored other fields of the artistic domain, such as poetry and painting. Zelei also had an alternative band, where he wrote the music and lyrics. Their gigs were a mix of performance art and industrial music. Nowadays, he mainly creates photographs and sometimes paintings, though music and writing are no longer part of his creative proces.

The work of Zelei are both pre-thought creations, while some of them emerge on their own. Zelei has a notebook, in which he writes down most of the ideas that occur to him during his daily life. In this, he doesn’t work out too much of the details, as he likes to leave room for improvisation during the shooting. Zelei makes a draft and never knows in advance, how the final image will be put together. The final image depends on a lot of factors, such as who the models are, which props he has on hand, his current mood etc. It is frequent that the improvised ideas of Zelei add a lot of new dimensions to the image, and sometimes they even change the original idea to something completely different.

Instinctively - if Zelei feels a special kind of excitement when he reads or sees something, that means it is important to him, for some reason - most of the time the process happens unconsciously and he cannot grasp for what reason he gets excited. It is something inside of him, that wants to show up, to manifest.

When name dropping on artists that inspires him, Zelei mentions the Czech contemporary photographer Jan Saudek (b. 1935). When Zelei first saw the images of Saudek many years ago he was surprised, thinking ‘Oh, photography can be like that?’. Also other photographers are worth mentioning to Zelei: the American photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Roger Ballen (b. 1950). Classic art is also a big inspiration to Zelei, the biggest influences comes from the Dutch Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 - 1569) and Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 - 1516), as Zelei loves their bizarre, grotesque, sometimes funny , sometimes apocalyptic world, something he himself also strives to create using his tools. In general, Zelei is into art, he loves classic and contemporary art - not just paintings and sculptures, but performance and installation art too. One of his favourites is the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, who according to Zelei has a huge amount of mind-blowing art pieces (sculptures, drawings and photos). Zelei also gets inspired by contemporary dance, movies and music.

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This article about Peter Zelei takes part of the 30th  magazine,  ARTICULATE #31. Read, download or order your print version of the full publication below. 

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