George Baloghy

Who is George Baloghy?

George Baloghy is a prominent New Zealand artist. He is a painter, preferring to paint with oil on canvas.

He was born in 1950 in Budapest, Hungary and emigrated to New Zealand in 1956 as a refugee. He was educated at St Peter's College, Auckland and at the University of Auckland from which he graduated Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1977. He has had 27 major solo exhibitions in New Zealand and Australia, commencing in 1978.

Baloghy's style can be called a particular kind of realism, where major elements are altered and shifted around for dramatic effect. Some of these paintings are close to fiction, yet attempt to narrate a greater truth of the feeling of place. The realism depicted has been described by John Daly-Peoples as being more like paintings of models of the landscape. Heightened edges and colours produce a sharpness of detail and an atmosphere that is at once familiar, yet faintly alien. Many of his works contain references to other painters and paintings.

Baloghy lives and works in Auckland and Hahei Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula. Many of the subjects of his paintings are in those places.