AUGUSTA, GA.- The board and staff of Augusta’s Morris Museum of Art mourn the loss of artist Janos Enyedi, who died on Monday, October 6, 2011, at age 63. Enyedi was an internationally renowned artist whose paintings, sculpture, drawings, and photographs celebrated his fascination with the industrial landscapes and ports of the United States and Europe.

“Janos was an irresistible force, a man on a mission who sought to capture a vision of the American industrial landscape that memorialized its majesty as well as its fall. It would be too facile to characterize it as a kind of memento mori, a recognition of pre-eminence past. The fact that he achieved this vision with great style and grace is a testament to him as an artist. As a person, well, there was hardly anyone who ever lived life with more brio than he. Janos often characterized himself as ‘the Mad Hungarian,’ which sometimes led others to conclude, incorrectly, that he was angry. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was crazily lively and one of the jolliest men I ever knew,” said Kevin Grogan, Director of the Morris Museum of Art.

The Morris Museum owns four photographs by Enyedi—Industrial Augusta Souvenir, Abandoned Machine; Industrial Augusta Souvenir, Downtown; Industrial Augusta Souvenir, Graniteville Company; and Industrial Augusta Souvenir, Stack—Confederate Gunpowder Factory. Commissioned at the time of his 2004 exhibition, Janos Enyedi: Made in America, the photographs will be featured in the upcoming exhibition, Local Color: Photography of the South, which opens November 12 at the Morris Museum.

Janos Enyedi
George "Janos" Enyedi, was born December 16, 1947, in Blue Island , IL , the son of second- generation Hungarian immigrants. His father, George, was a Protestant minister and a United States Navy chaplain. His mother Irene, was a Social Worker for the State of Illinois . Growing up on Chicago's South Side, Enyedi was fascinated by the city's steel mills, assembly plants, and factories. Those memories, and impressions gathered during car trips through Rust Belt regions of the Midwest and East Coast, became his abiding inspiration. Enyedi depicted scenes and eye-stopping details-real and imagined-he gleaned from ports, coal yards and steel mills. He was a pioneer in creating weighty, "fool the eye" sculptural assemblages, which appeared to be made of heavy steel but were actually painted poster board.

In recent years, Enyedi explored photography-based digital printmaking of subjects such as the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine and ports on the East Coast and Great Lakes. His sculptures, assemblages, drawings, and photographs are in the collections of: the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; and the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA. His artwork was featured in the United States State Department's "Art in the Embassies," program for which he served as Ad Hoc Cultural Representative to the Ukraine in 2007. His works were also exhibited in U.S. embassies in Cambodia, Bolivia, France and Azerbejdzan. Over the course of his career, Enyedi's art was featured in scores of solo, two-person and group exhibitions in museums, public spaces and galleries in Washington, D.C, New York City, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Denver, Dallas, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Richmond, Budapest, Cologne, Berlin and South Korea. Enyedi's works are included in dozens of corporate and private collections in the United States and Europe. He is represented in Washington D.C. by the Kathleen Ewing Gallery. Other galleries currently representing Mr. Enyedi include Page Bond Gallery , Richmond , VA , Concept Art Gallery, Pittsburgh , PA ; and The Bonfoey Company, Cleveland , OH .