After studying art in Budapest and a period of study in Rome, Judit Reigl fled to Paris in 1950 where a fellow student, Simon Hantaï, took her in. They quickly became part of the emerging informal art scene in France. Thanks to her acquaintance with Hantaï, she met André Breton, the spokesman of the Surrealists. She was so inspired by the Surrealist technique of écriture automatique (automatic writing) that Reigl began to work with her whole body. She filled her pictures with movement and tempo and hurled buckets of paint onto large-format canvases. In the series Éclatement (explosion) from 1955 onwards, she worked for the first time with industrial pigments and linseed oil, which she threw onto the canvas with her hands and spread over the surface from the centre of the painting, using various tools such as metal scrapers.
Judit Reigl (1923–2020)
Éclatement, 1955
Currently exhibited: Yes (Gallery: Lines against Limits)
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 193.4 x 208 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_221
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Keywords:
Previous owner: Musée Fabre, Montpellier
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, 2011
Solo exhibition:
2010
‘Judit Reigl – Retrospective Exhibition’, MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary
Group exhibition:
2007
‘La couleur toujours recommencée – Hommage à Jean Fournier’, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France
After studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, Judit Reigl spent two years in Rome with the help of a residential scholarship. She visited the Venice Biennale in 1948 where Peggy Guggenheim presented works by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The young artist was very impressed and started following the development of American art. She returned to Budapest in 1948 to look after her sick mother and found that the Communist takeover of Hungary was almost complete. After eight failed attempts to flee the country, she finally made it to Paris in 1950 where she was taken in by a fellow student, Simon Hantaï. They quickly became part of the emerging informal art scene in France and members of the inner circle around art critic Michel Tapié. They also exhibited together with Georges Mathieu in 1956. It was through Hantaï that Reigl met André Breton, spokesman for the Surrealists and the author of the foreword in the catalogue to their first exhibition. Inspired by the Surrealist technique of écriture automatique (automatic writing), Reigl began to work with her whole body. She filled her pictures with movement and tempo and hurled buckets of paint on to large-format canvases.
In the series Éclatement (explosion) from 1955 onwards, she worked for the first time with industrial pigments and linseed oil, which she threw onto the canvas with her hands and spread over the surface from the centre of the painting, using various tools such as metal scrapers. Her expressive paintings can be read as depicting the shattering or exploding of masses. They visualise the pure energy that filled the artist as she regained her creative and individual freedom in Paris. In her search for new methods of making images, she took great inspiration from East Asia: ‘One of the most magnificent answers to the quest for depth: The Chinese sense of space. Unlike Western perspective, which narrows down, Chinese perspective opens up on infinity, both plunging downwards and ascending.’ [1] From 1963 until her death in 2020, Judit Reigl lived and worked in Marcoussis, southwest of Paris, constantly adding to a wide-ranging oeuvre which includes both abstract and figurative works.
[1] Judit Reigl in conversation with Christian Sorg: ‘Évident/Caché/Actualisé/Latent’, in: Documents sur, no. 2/3, October 1978, p. 34.
