Early Life
Judit Reigl was born on May 1, 1923, in Kapuvár, Hungary. She studied painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest where she was a student of István Szőnyi. She recieved a scholarship from the Hungarian Academy of Rome and traveled to Italy from 1941 to 1946. In October 1948, she returned to Hungary, which had been overtaken by a Soviet-style authoritarian regime. Determined to leave and after seven failed attempts, Reigl successfully crossed the Iron Curtain in March 1950 and a few months later arrived to Paris.
After Settling in Paris
Her earliest Parisian works, indebted to the oneiric imagery of Surrealism, include photo-collages as well as paintings of monstrous figures and of vividly colored phantasmagorical scenes, as in They Have an Insatiable Thirst for Infinity (Ils ont soif insatiable de l'infini, 1950). From 1952, Reigl started to experiment with gestural paint application that expanded on the Surrealist practice of automatic writing. By painting and scraping the canvas, she produced abstract works that featured elongated, Möbius strip–like biomorphic forms in glowing and often highly saturated colors. She lived and worked in Marcoussis.
About her Series
In May 1954, fellow Hungarian painter Simon Hantaï took André Breton to Reigl's studio; Breton immediately offered her a solo exhibition, which she at first turned down, then accepted in November. The show took place at L'étoile scellée, then the gallery of the Parisian Surrealist group, and was composed of both Reigl's figurative and abstract works. After the exhibition, she dissolved her connections with Breton and adopted a purely abstract and vigorously physical approach to painting. By hurling compounds of industrial pigment and linseed oil on the canvas and then molding them with various metal devices into explosive marks, she used her body as an instrument of painting. In resulting series such as Outburst (Éclatement, 1955–58), Center of Dominance (Centre de dominance, 1958–59), and Mass Writing (Écriture en masse, 1959–65), the streaks of pigment appear on white grounds in different spatial and chromatic configurations that suggest force fields, shaped by the kinetic energy of the artist's body and the gravity of paint. In Guano (1958–65), Reigl recycled a group of abandoned canvases that once covered her studio floor by painting over them: the works use the waste material of the studio and, as opposed to the immediacy of her gestural works, record the passage of time through the accumulated layers of thickly textured paint. In 1963, Reigl left Paris and moved to Marcoussis, a village southwest from the capital. In February 1966, after noticing the emergence of an anthropomorphic figure in her work, she devoted a series of monumental paintings titled Man (Homme, 1966–72) to the representation of fragmented humans, mostly male torsos. In the series Unfolding (Déroulement, 1973–85), she resumed her interest in the spatial-temporal dimension of gesture. Created by the cadences of her moving body as well as by unorthodox paint applications that provoked bleeds through the weave of the canvas, the works in Unfolding feature horizontal rows of graphic signs that are visible on both sides of the paintings. In the late 1980s, she returned to the human figure and has continued her investigation of bodies and spaces ever since.
Notable Achievements
Reigl’s works could be juxtapositioned with such star artists of the New York School like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko or Clyfford Still.
Her paintings are part of such public collections as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, The MoMA – New York, The Guggenheim Museum of New York, The Tate Modern in London and The Centre Pompidou in Paris among many others.
She had been presented in many solo exhibitions in: France (Galerie Kléber, Paris, 1956; Galerie rencontres, Paris, 1972; Musée de peinture, Grenoble, 1980; Galerie de France, Paris, 1986, 2012; Galerie Le Minotaure - Galerie Alain Le Gaillard – Galerie Antoine Laurentin – Galerie Anne de Villepoix – Galerie Le Studiolo Galerie de France, 2017); Germany (Galerie Van de Loo, Munich, 1966); Austria (Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Fine Art, Vienna, 2013); Hungary (Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts, Budapest, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016); Belgium (Laurentin Gallery, Brussels, 2013, 2016) The Netherlands (Merchanthouse, Amsterdam 2017) and the United States (Janos Gat Gallery, New York, 2007, 2014; Ubu Gallery, New York, 2011, 2014; Shepherd W&K Galleries, New York, 2013; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, 2016)
Notable group exhibitions include the Guggenheim International Award, 1964 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964), as well as Manifeste: Une histoire parallèle, 1960–1990 (1993) and Elles© Centrepompidou: Artistes femmes dans les collections du Centre Pompidou at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009–11). Retrospectives were also held at the Maison de la culture, Rennes (1974), and Musée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse (1992), both in France, as well as at the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary (2010) and Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary (2014).
Due to her extraordinary talent Judit Reigl could be mentioned alongside with the most important female abstract expressionist artists like Lee Krasner, Joann Mitchell, Alma Thomas, Helen Frankenthaler, Perle Fine, Mary Abbott or Corinne Mitchelle West.
Artworks of Judit Reigl are available at the Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts.
