Szinyei Painting Featured on Budapest High School Mural

‘Balloon’, a painting by renowned Hungarian artist Pál Szinyei Merse has been reproduced on a 500m² firewall in the courtyard of the Budapest high school named after the painter.

“It is unique not only in Budapest, but also in Hungary, to put an authentic reproduction of a famous painting on a firewall. In nearly 20 years of operation, we have faced many difficult tasks, but this was perhaps the biggest challenge of all,” the painters of the group ‘Neopaint Works’ say. It took two weeks for five artists to complete the monumental mural.

The students of the Szinyei Merse Pál High School, which is starting its 125th school year this year, will now be able to see a huge scale version of one of the eponym's most famous works every day.

"The balloon is a symbol of the soaring of human thought and artistic freedom, which does not drift away to cosmic heights but remains close to the earth, the habitat of humanity," says Anna Merse Szinyei in her book on the life and work of her great-grandfather, about the artist's "perhaps most original, triumphant and exuberant" painting of 1882, inspired by a balloon flight of the painter’s brother-in-law four years before.

On their social media page, the Neopaint artists thank their partners in the realization of the project: the Municipality of Terézváros (Budapest’s 6^th district), the management and parents of the high school and the Hungarian National Gallery (where the paining is exhibited).