RCB

Levente Bálványos (b. 1966, Budapest) graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1997, where he studied under György Jovánovics, and subsequently completed postgraduate studies at the same institution. Between 1998 and 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Derkovits Scholarship. Since the mid-1990s, he has exhibited extensively in Hungary and internationally. His works are held in several major public collections, including the Ludwig Museum (Budapest), the Haus Bill – Max Bill Georges Vantongerloo Stiftung (Zumikon, Switzerland), and the Ritter Museum (Germany).

Bálványos's practice explores the intersections of geometric abstraction, spatial perception, and visual cognition. His sculptures, reliefs, and spatial constructions are distinguished by an exceptionally refined and intellectually rigorous use of geometric forms. His works exist in a delicate equilibrium between symmetry and asymmetry, openness and enclosure, order and contingency, often operating at the very threshold of perceptual certainty.

Within his artistic practice, space is not merely the setting in which the work exists but its primary carrier of meaning. Through the reduction of sculptural form, minimal spatial depth, and almost imperceptible shifts in geometric relationships, he constructs visual situations that continually challenge and reorient the viewer's spatial perception.

Since the early 2010s, Bálványos has developed a distinctive body of graphite-and-plaster reliefs that investigate the relationship between control and chance. By dropping graphite rods from a predetermined height into wet plaster and subsequently intervening in the resulting formations, he allows accidental processes and deliberate artistic decisions to jointly determine the final composition. These fragile, seemingly weightless surfaces evoke associations with landscapes, traces of violence, and the transience of human existence, while remaining firmly rooted in the visual language of geometric abstraction.