Elekes Gyula. DeSIGNs. Enamel Art Exhibition
The Cluj-Napoca Museum of Art, a cultural institution operating under the authority of the Cluj County Council and Harghita County Center for the Preservation and Promotion of Traditional Culture, a public institution subordinated to Harghita County Council, presents, from 8 to 20 September 2026, Elekes Gyula’s enamel art exhibition, DeSIGNs. The exhibition will open on Tuesday, 8 September 2026, at 6:00 PM. The opening will feature a musical performance by the Cári Tibor Trio: Cári Tibor – composer, piano; Dávid Anna – violin; Szabó J. Attila – cello.
The exhibition brings together works representative of Elekes Gyula’s artistic practice, developed over several decades around the medium of enamel. Initially trained in graphic arts, the artist turned to this technique in the early 1980s, gradually developing a distinctive visual language in which the rigour of a centuries-old craft meets experimentation and the unpredictable transformation of matter through fire.
The title of the exhibition, DeSIGNs, points to the central role of the sign in the artist’s visual universe. The human face and body, the tree, the seed, animal figures, the wing, the cross, the solar disc and the spiral form a recurring repertoire informed by Christian iconography, myths and legends, folk ornament, family memory and everyday experience. Elekes Gyula revisits and transforms these motifs, freeing them from fixed meanings and bringing them into a contemporary visual language. His relationship with Székely and Hungarian traditions and with the cultural heritage of the Carpathian Basin occupies an important place in his work, without the works seeking merely to recover or reproduce a traditional repertoire. Inherited signs are reinterpreted and recomposed, becoming points of departure for reflections on identity, memory and cultural transmission. Tradition thus emerges as a living material, continually subject to transformation and renewal.
The enamel technique itself plays an essential role. Glass powder, the copper support and successive firings contribute directly to the construction of the image. Colour, transparency, cracks and variations in density retain traces of the firing process, while fire becomes more than a technical tool: it fixes and transforms matter, introducing time, chance and irreversibility into the work. In this encounter between drawing and matter, control and unpredictability, signs acquire new forms and meanings.
Elekes Gyula was born in 1960 in Odorheiu Secuiesc, where he continues to live and work. He graduated from the Graphic Arts Department of the Art High School in Târgu Mureș and later furthered his studies in enamel art through workshops and creative centres in Germany and Spain. Between 1990 and 2017, he regularly participated in the International Enamel Art Symposium in Kecskemét, while his artistic practice has also been accompanied by a significant commitment to education. In 2002, he established an enamel workshop in Odorheiu Secuiesc, where he continues to teach and develop the technique. His artistic activity has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Pro Cultura Hungarica (2011), the Bessenyei György Award (2022) and the Ferenczy Noémi Award (2024). His works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Romania and numerous other European countries, as well as in China, and are held in public and private collections across Europe, the United States and Japan.
Through DeSIGNs, visitors are invited to discover a universe in which the sign becomes a meeting point between memory and the present, tradition and transformation, drawing and fire.
