After the Second World War, more than 80 artist colonies with longer and shorter lifes were established in Hungary, including the Artist Colony of Győr, founded in 1969, which owes its continuous operation over time to the new opportunities that have arisen over time and the brave changes of direction.
At the beginning of its history, in the 1970s, the artist colony mainly had drawing teachers and amateur artists from Győr and the region, the colony operated as a summer free school. It had its first heyday in the early 1980s and 1990s, when young talents moving from the capital to Győr, in close cooperation with prosperous local factories and industrial cooperatives, shaped it into an internationally renowned sculptor-creation colony. The gradual disappearance of the industrial background from the 1990s resulted in another profile change in its history. In connection with the Győr Graphic Workshop, which has been operating since 1981, as well as the International Graphic Biennale, founded in 1994, foreign visual artists from well-known domestic and sister cities of Győr have participated in the international creative colony.
The main base of the Art Colony organized by the Győr Museum has been a graphic workshop used jointly with the Győr Graphic Workshop since the 1990s. Thanks to this, the graphic character of the creative colony has become more and more clearly visible over the past two decades.
Since 2020, mainly domestic and foreign graphic designers - renowned artists and young talents - have been invited to the two-week artist colony. The participants can work side by side and build from each other's experiences to realize their creative ideas in one of the country's graphic workshops offering exceptional opportunities, which has been operating in Újkapu Street since 2022. Some people come with concrete ideas and a ready-made work plan, others reflect on the new environment and create with unique and different traditional duplicated graphic techniques, and experiment freely.
The artist colony traditionally ends with an exhibition, where the public can see the works made at the creative colony. The offered works of the participants enrich the contemporary graphic collection of the Rómer Museum.
