Born in Vancouver, Peggy Imredy produced A Guide to Sculpture in Vancouver in 1980. For research she incorporated the files of her husband, Elek Imredy, who sculpted the life-size Girl in Wetsuit near the shoreline at Lumberman's Arch in Stanley Park. "My sculpture," Elek Imredy wrote in a letter, "does not owe its conceptual inspiration to Copenhagen's Mermaid... but to the multibillion dollar ocean treasure in minerals and oil on our continental shelf waiting to be mined... She is a symbolic figure of our aquanauts who will explore this treasure." Peggy Imredy's 1980 booklet is dedicated to Charles Marega, who provided many B.C. sculptures such as the Lions at the entrance to Lions Gate Bridge. "Sculpture," she writes, "at present is an underground movement in Vancouver."

She also published a summary of Elek Imredy's career in 1993. He was born in Budapest on April 13, 1912 and he died in Vancouver on October 22, 1994. He immigrated to Vancouver in 1957 following the Hungarian revolution. He produced sculptures of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in front of the Supreme Court building in Ottawa, Judge Matthew Begbie in New Westminster, Grand Trunk Railway president Melville Hays in front of Prince Rupert City Hall, the Mariners' Memorial on the Prince Rupert harbour front and archivist J.S. Matthews at the Vancouver archives.

Elek Imredy pictured at right.

BOOKS:

A Guide to Sculpture in Vancouver. (1980)
The Sculpture of Elek Imredy. By Elek Imredy. (Vancouver, B.C.: Terry Noble, 1993)

[BCBW 1992] "Art"