Péter Kemény has taught ceramic design and practical application for 23 years at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. He studied at the university too, and his student days were some of the best of his life. As a student his mentors taught him how to build and use wood-fired kilns. Inspired by these experiences and keen to share his knowledge, he has held wood-fired kiln demonstrations for his students for more than 15 years at various locations: in the lovely town of Siklós and in Verőce, as well as at International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, which has been active for many years. He is convinced that these traditional firing methods should still be considered high-tech today, and he feels a sense of duty to pass the knowledge on to his students.
Biography
Péter Kemény was born in Budapest and after completing the ceramics programme at the Secondary School of Visual Arts, he was admitted to the Hungarian University of Arts and Design (the precursor to MOME). He spent a few extremely exciting and eventful years there, and a year and a half doing a master's at the International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, gaining a significant amount of experience and knowledge in the process. He works with sculptures with sacred themes and reinterprets traditional Asian pottery and sculptural objects. His works are presented under the brand name BrutalceramicS.
He shows his work at numerous group exhibitions every year, both domestically and abroad. He was awarded a special prize at the 2011 International Triennial of Silicate Arts. In 2012 he won the Ferenczy Noémi Award, and his last solo exhibition was in 2019.
About his work:
He has always worked on multiple things, sometimes simultaneously and at other times on after the other, but often overlapping. He is currently busy creating objects in two, seemingly disparate areas. His sacral themed works, entitled fragments of a landscape, have a long history stretching all the way back to his diploma project.
He also crafts objects and crockery for the brand BrutalceramicS. This has been a phenomenal and greatly educational detour, which he started about 12 years ago. In doing this he humbly and respectfully endeavours to turn towards an East Asian culture that he holds in high esteem, yet finds almost inscrutable. He is currently creating objects that have been filtered through his personality and further developed as a distillation of this cheerful and focused work. With these objects, he intends to express a kind of respectful homage in his own individual language towards East Asian perspectives and approaches to ceramics. Uniquely expressed in the vernacular of BrutalceramicS.
In truth, the two areas are not far from each other... on the contrary...