Arpad Bari was born in Hungary in 1953. He spent his childhood in Pilisszentivan, a
village in the area around Buda. He went to school here.
After his school leaving exam at the F. Rakoczi Gymnasium in Budapest, Bari
registered for studies at the Semmelweis Medical University and qualified for his
medical certificate (diplom) in 1978.

Painting has always played an important part in his life and Bari organized numerous
exhibitions on his own during his university years and took part in collective shows.
As member of the theatre group, Bari took on various acting roles in plays and
even painted the back-drops for them. As his paintings were awakening interest
everywhere he was convinced that art can, at least indirectly, reform the world.
While still practising medicine he was actually able to live from his art.

On discharge from military service in 1981, that fateful exhibition was launched in the
Csili Galery in an outlying district of the capital Budapest where his paintings were
put on show. Due to the TV coverage en detail by Ilona Bayer, a TV journalist, the
report was screened in the first “edition” of the TV News and met with an astonishing
response. On the morning after the vernissage every single painting had been sold
within half an hour.

Visitors to the exhibition had travelled from all over Hungary to visit Arpad Bari´s
show in Budapest. On the strength of some reproductions she had seen, an elderly
lady had travelled from New York arriving in Budapest at the beginning of 1982.
She wanted to open an art gallery and she was of the opinion she had found the
painter she had been looking for her whole life. She wanted them both to fly together,
there and then, to the USA. In 1982, of course, that was not possible from communist
Hungary. An application for a passport was promptly refused. After much protest he
was allowed to fly to New York at the beginning of 1984.

Turbulent months followed and he moved house although not always voluntarily.
He had addresses in Washington, Paris, Frankfurt, again in Paris and then in
Munich finally ending up in Aschaffenburg in 1985 where, between shorter or
longer breaks, he has lived ever since. Bari came, in fact, to Aschaffenburg for an
exhibition and liked the feel of the town so much that he decided spontaneously
to take up residence. As then in Csili in Hungary, Bari opened an exhibition in
the “Jesuitenkirche” making his art quickly known to many people in the area. The
Jesuitenchurch had been converted to an exhibition room at the end of World War
II. Important exhibitions are organized here, now as then, in the Main Metropol, a
beloved “holiday resort” of the last Bavarian kings who appreciated the mild climate.

The world does not stand still. Hungarians have dismantled the “Iron Curtain”, the
two German states are re-united, the Russians have left East Germany and the
Americans have left Aschaffenburg, was an important garrison during the Cold War.

Arpad Bari began his work anew as a doctor, first of all in a small private clinic and
has obtained German citizenship. He has averred and recognized, for himself, that
art – in the first instance painting – cannot save the world. His own world travels
began earlier with personal journeys to India, Nepal, Thailand and Kenia and he flew
out to the Philippines in 1997 to start humanitarian medical work.
He flew once more to Kenia where he had already worked as a representative of
an organization which had opened a so-called “slum ambulance” in one of the the

biggest slums of Nairobi, in the Matare Valley.
When you work regularly in the crisis areas of the world for a relief organization you
begin to see the problems on earth differently. First, Arpad Bari went to the Sudan
in 1999 with the German relief organization “Cap Anamur” then in the autumn of the
same year to Australia with “Doctors without border” from where he arrived on the
island of East Timor with the first relief troops as a member of the Dutch section,
once the international Peace Corps had assessed the situation as sufficiently secure.

He was sent back to Sambia in the spring of 2000 to oversee medical care of civil
war refugees from neighbouring Angola. A few months later he was working in the
mountains of Eritrea taking part in caring for refugees from another war.

A basic change in his private life has meant that trips abroad have become fewer
although he did work in Tschad in 2004 when tens of thousands of refugees arrived
from neighbouring Darfur. This time he was on his way with the Red Cross.

Five of Arpad Bari´s books have already appeared in the German language. In the
first he describes the dilema of his double life (both doctor and artist) in which the
background to his paintings is illuminated. This has been available , too, in Hungary
since 2000 via the “Fekete Sas” publishing house.
Bari organized three exhibitions in Hungary which yet again found acclaim
(newspapers, TV and radio reports).

The topic of his paintings over the past few years are concerned with his
humanitarian work and impressions surface which caught up with him and fit into a
direct common basis which has its genesis somewhere and sometime in Hungarian
fields near Buda, in a small village in Transdanubia…