In addition to Paris and Berlin, Judit Reigl was born 100 years ago this year, and her home country is also commemorating her with several exhibitions. The Kunsthalle, in collaboration with the Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts Gallery, is paying tribute to the world-famous painter with a major centenary exhibition. In addition to the more than 80 Reigl paintings on display, the exhibition also includes works by outstanding artists of the Second Paris School.
Judit Reigl was born on 1 May 1923 in Kapuvár. She graduated in painting from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1945, then travelled throughout Italy on a scholarship from the Hungarian Academy in Rome between 1946-48. In 1950, she emigrated to Paris, where in the following years her surrealist works were a success after success. Her first solo exhibition at the Galerie à l’Étoile scellée, then the Parisian Surrealists’ exhibition space, in 1954, included figurative and abstract works. In a letter to her, André Breton praised the artist, saying, “You have a toolbox that impresses me and I am sure you are capable of great things.”
Reigl started from surrealism, creating total automatic writing, through gesture painting to total abstraction. The periods of her oeuvre are closely intertwined, building on each other and often overlapping. Her encounters with contemporary art in post-war Paris, particularly the work of Max Ernst, André Masson and Roberto Matta, encouraged her to expand her creative toolbox: she scraped and rubbed her canvases, pressing them together and making impressions.
The Kunsthalle exhibition opens with works from her years as a scholar in Rome that have never before been seen in a museum. Among the works from her artistic period, the Explosion series (1955-1957) is a special highlight, in which he threw a mixture of industrial paint powder and linseed oil onto the canvas and spread the paint stacks with a curved curtain rod, sometimes a machete. The Domination Centre (1958-1959) and the Block Writing (1959-1965) series extended the physicality of the gesture painting process. In the Guano series (1958-1965), tracing and layering appear as the painter reworked and recycled her earlier canvases to protect the floor of her studio.
On one of the canvases in Block Writing, Reigl noticed the appearance of a human torso. The anthropomorphic forms that emerged as shadows from the thick layers of paint thrown on the canvas remained with him throughout and became the main motif of her series Man (1966-1972). In the series Process (1973-1985), her interest turned again to the spatial and temporal dimension of gesture. In the second half of the 1980s, she returned to the human figure, persistently pursuing her investigation of bodies and spaces (Entrance-Exit, 1986-1988; Facing, 1988-1990; New York 11 September 2001, 2001-2002). The final section of the exhibition includes her gestures on paper. Judit Reigl was still working at the age of 90. She died on 6 August 2020.
The Parisian artistic milieu and the affinity in approach are evoked in the paintings of several prominent representatives of the Second Paris School, including many artists of Hungarian origin. The Second Paris School, or Nouvelle École de Paris, is not the name of an art school, but rather the collective name of an artistic grouping associated with a particular place and period. The place is Paris and the period is between 1945 and 1965, when more than 350 artists working in non-figurative art lived and worked in the city in the years following the Second World War. In this section of the exhibition, works by Antal Bíró, Vera Braun, Ferenc Fiedler, Simon Hantai, Pál Kallós, Zsigmond Kolozsváry, Anton Prinner, Endre Rozsda, Géza Szóbel, Ágota Vajtó, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Jean Degottex are on display.