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Balazs Szabo


Balazs Szabo is a Hungarian-born artist and author who has lived in the United States since 1956. He is best known as a fine artist influenced by the Viennese "fantastic realists" style. He derives his artistic inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs among others. His portraits, large murals and surrealist works are internationally-known and can be found in private and in corporate collections throughout Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Europe and the United States. Balazs Szabo's selected works are in the museums of Hawaii, New Jersey and North Carolina. Mr. Szabo's first published art book THE EYE OF MUSE (1985)) won the 1987 USA Print Design Excellence Award was selected out of 40,000 contestants. His historical autobiography KNOCK IN THE NIGHT published by Refugee Press (2006) has been translated into the Hungarian from the original English in 2008.

Balazs Szabo is the younger of Sandor Szabo's two sons. Balazs's parents divorced in 1947 and Sandor remarried in 1948 to then renowned Hungarian film star Barczy Kato. Sandor Szabo was an acclaimed Hungarian American who received the highest awards an actor can claim in Hungary including the Kossuth Prize. Balazs at the age of three years was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, Paula and Eugene at Lake Balaton, while his older brother, Barna, lived with his father in Budapest. Educated and cultured, his maternal grandparents taught him literature, music and art in the small space they shared as a family in the villa which previously belonged to them prior to the Communist confiscations. At age seven he met his father again and a few years later was taken back to Budapest to live with his birth mother. But this arrangement did not last. Battered by her, Balazs ran away and testified in court where he appeared by himself. The Court ruled to have Balazs live with his father, brother and stepmother, Barczy Kato in Budapest.

In 1956 after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution by the returning Soviet army his family was placed under house arrest. Balazs escaped, with the rest of his family following ten hours later. They all crossed the Austro-Hungarian border at different points, all uncertain of each other's fate. After a few weeks, Balazs was reunited with his brother, father and stepmother at the Eisenstadt refugee camp outside of Vienna, Austria. Because of his father's stature in Hungary, the family was granted special status with immediate asylum in the United States. After surviving a bumpy emergency crash landing at Ireland's Shannon Airport, the family finally landed as temporary residents of Camp Kilmer, New Jersey as Elis Island was long boarded up.


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