Gábor Városi was born 1965 in Budapest,Hungary, and displayed a talent for art at a young age. From 1980 to 1984 he attended the Secondary School of Visual Arts as a student of artists such as Zoltán Tölg-Molnár and István Gábor, and won several competitions and awards, including the Domanovszky Award and the March 15 Concept Award, and graduated top of his class. He continued his studies in painting from 1985 to 1989 at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a student of the masters Ignác Kokas, and later Gábor Dienes. In 1987, he was invited by Layota Art AB to paint in Sweden, and exhibited his work in Stockholm. The material later won first prize in a contest at the Brussels Museum of Modern Art. His abstract, mixed-technique paintings of this period attracted the attention of Victor Vasarely, the father of op-art, who invited the young painter to become his student. He presented his first ever solo exhibition in the fall of 1987, at La Galerie de La Rochefoucauld in Paris, where Victor Vasarely gave the opening speech. This was followed by a number of subsequent exhibitions, including in Budapest, Bochum, and Karlsruhe.

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The paintings of his most recent period have been created using his new technique: layered and partially three-dimensional “artworks based on psychic automatism, but in the spirit of new pop art  – which are manually painted and printed, and also partly created digitally”. Traditional panel paintings – partially three-dimensional works based on layers – are experimentally complemented with monitors on which a slow metamorphosis takes place. These works are also represented as NFTs in the virtual space.

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He has expressed his support for a fuller embrace of technology and digitalization in the art world, arguing that new domains such as virtual reality open up fresh artistic frontiers and make art accessible to the widest possible public.

In addition to painting, Városi has also worked for many years in the fields of photography, sculpture, glasswork, and architectural design, where he is particularly well known for his “habitable sculptures”. Most prominent among these is the Poet’s Garden Villa Park and Gallery, a series of luxury residences in the Buda Hills whose bold design was inspired by such artist/architects as Hundertwasser and Gaudí.

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A book by journalist Tamás Nagy and Munkácsy Award-winning graphic artist László Lelkes, summarizing the oeuvre of Gábor Városi, was published in 2022.