Q&A with: András Baranyai

András Baranyai's illustrations have graced the pages of Readers Digest, Unit and the cover of Hungarian illustration magazine Roham. Currently exhibiting at Printa, András takes some time out to talk to us about his recent autonomous prints, comic books, toy robots and his future projects. 

Introduce yourself:

I studied at the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts in the graphic design department. There we did  lots of projects from different areas of graphic design such as typography, design and illustration. I always prefered work with figures, characters and over the course of these projects I realised that my interests swayed more towards illustration.

Tell us about the serigraphs which you are exhibiting at Printa:

These are remixes of some older graphics of mine with some new elements thrown in (for example the mass of men comes from my comic). I work with vectors so it's easy for me to transfer the graphic elements into different images - it's fun to experiment and try new combinations! I play with these objects and elements like with building block toys, or like a painter with colors.

You have a very distinctive figurative style in your illustrations - where did this evolve from?

They come from different areas and it's a combination of many influences. Some of them come from plastic baby-toys and I also really like the toys from the '70s, 80's made of tin (cars, robots, spaceships) and the graphics on them. I'm inspirated by heavy, industrial objects and machines too. Otherwise music effects are
important to me too, particularly industrial noise experiments.

If you could be any comic book character who would it be?

Maybe, Little Nemo. That would be a great surreal trip!

What are you currently working on?

Now I'm working on two children's book commissions. One of them is about the history of Communism, it's a really interesting project  for the Statue Park in Budapest. The other is a literature adaptation, a story from  Greek mythology. There will also be my own exhibition  in the Roham gallery in May. For that I'm working on more autonomic artworks.

View more of  Andras' work over on his website www.andrasbaranyai.com