Biographical Information

Krisztina Rényi was born in Budapest in 1956 and now lives in Szentendre, Hungary. She studied printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1976 to 1980 an took postgraduate art courses from 1980 to 1984.
      At the beginning of her career she applied the technique of serigraphy and then moved on to lithography and etching. Recently she has been making large watercolors, oil paintings and smaller frescos. The sources of her post-symbolic, surrealistic art, manifesting themselves in series, are the world of tales, myths and individual mythology. Her returning subjects are cards, mobius band, well, feather, pelican wounding itself, labyrinth, and Zodiac signs. In her large watercolors, the main motif is a dominating figure, but she avoids realistic rendering; instead she shows the symbols of a surreal, imagined space. Other frequent motifs are water, volcanic landscape, cave, sky, and cosmic signs.
      She has been illustrating regularly since 1984, especially children’s books and volumes of poems. More realistic rendering, graphic and design elements dominate in them.
      She has illustrated more than 50 books, including fairy tales and folk tales, as well as literature and poetry for adults and young people. She also designs children’s books, leporellos, pop-up books, book covers, stamps and postcards. She employs all graphic art techniques in her work: drawing, pastel, pencil, water-color, as well as print making techniques such as etching, aqua tint, silk-screen printing and lithography. She particularly likes to use watercolor, airbrush, lithography, drawing and etching in her illustrations.
      In 1994 she was selected for the Bologna International Book and Illustration exhibition, and was featured in the Annual. Her works which were originally shown at the BIB in Bratislava, were also selected for the Japanese BIB exhibition, the World Illustrations in Japan. She was nominated the 2000 IBBY Honor List for her illustrations in the book of folk tales, Johnny the Wizard, written by Elek Benedek and published by Hollo es Tarsa. She is a candidate for the H. C. Andersen prize in 2004 and for the Astrid Lindgren prize in 2005.