Endre Hevizi

Endre Hevizi (1923–2017) was a Hungarian artist who became a naturalised British citizen. After studying architecture in Budapest and Germany he fled to Denmark at the end of the Second World War, and lived for a while as a refugee, becoming a Post-Impressionist oil-painter, muralist, and self-taught ceramist. After marrying a Danish woman, he emigrated with her to England in 1946, and found work at Booths and Colcloughs, one of the Staffordshire Potteries. He moved to London after 1953 to work in the fields of architectural and interior design.

For a while, Hevizi was involved in decorating churches and housing estates, under contract with the Ministry of Public Building and Works and the Co-operative Wholesale Society. He also collaborated with countryman Gyula Bajó, with whom he had worked at the pottery, on a mosaic mural in Ipswich and a tourist office in London. In his other work, he produced ceramic panels on religious themes, as well as stained-glass panels and mosaics for Debre Libanos, in the Ethiopian Empire; smaller individual pieces were put on display and won him several awards. Though semi-retired during the 1990s and 2000s to care for his ailing wife, in his late life he made a comeback, contributing public art in places of significance for the Hungarians of Romania. He was inspired by the folk art of Sălaj County, and designed windows for the Hungarian Calvinist church in Zalău.

Biography Hevizi was born "Hévízi Endre" in 1923, in the city of Szeged, Kingdom of Hungary; dreaming of becoming a painter, he studied locally at the Gábor Baross Realschule (presently the István Vedres Vocational College). From 1942 he studied for a degree in architecture at the Palatine Joseph University of Technology and Economics in Budapest. Following the Soviet invasion of October 1944, the university was evacuated to Halle an der Saale in Nazi Germany, where Hevizi continued his studies and also lectured on architectural history. He was unimpressed with this appointment, noting in a 2015 interview that: "anyone who knew which end of the pencil to draw with became a teacher's assistant." Increasingly interested in abstract art, "he solved a number of building decoration tasks: he created church ceramic plaques, abstract wall decorations made of mosaic, bronze, glass, and ceramics."

Hevizi also worked with Bajó to decorate the Greek State Tourist Office on Regent Street, London. The Co-operative Wholesale Society commissioned Bajó and Hevizi to complete a number of stained-glass windows and mosaics for the Debre Libanos monastery in the Ethiopian Empire, including the largest mosaics (measuring more than ) ever made in England at that time. A widower since 2010, Hevizi travelled to Zalău to see his work completed in mid-2015, at which time he reported that he had returned to more intense work, partly inspired by the Hungarian crafts of Sălaj County, and was exhibiting it in England. He died in London in 2017.