Judit Reigl

(Hungary, 01/05/1923 - 06/08/2020)

Guano (1957)

Celebrated for forging a unique artistic path between Surrealism and lyrical abstraction, Reigl’s legacy is one of fearless innovation; she reinvented painting as an embodied, performative act, continuously evolving across styles, techniques and media. Today, her work continues to challenge boundaries between abstraction and representation, earning her a singular place among 20th‑century European artists.

Born in Kapuvár, Hungary, she began her formal studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1941 and after graduating in 1945, received a scholarship to study in Italy where encounters with Renaissance and Byzantine art, particularly mosaics in Ravenna, had a profound impact on her sensibility. In Ravenna, Reigl met the English poet and sculptor Betty Anderson (1911-2007), who became her life partner.

Determined to preserve her artistic freedom under the Hungarian Soviet regime, in 1950 Reigl successfully crossed the Iron Curtain after eight failed attempts and arrived in Paris in March 1950. In Paris she began producing Surrealist photo-collages as well as paintings of monstrous figures and of vividly coloured phantasmagorical scenes, beginning her experiments with gestural paint application in 1952, expanding on the Surrealist practice of automatic writing.

In Paris, Reigl joined a community of Hungarian émigré artists, including Simon Hantaï, who introduced her to André Breton in 1954. Breton admired her early Surrealist paintings and, despite never formally joining the Surrealists, offered her a solo exhibition at the gallery À l’Étoile scellée which, at first, she turned down. After the exhibition, she dissolved her connections with Breton and adopted a purely abstract and vigorously physical approach to painting.

Image: Judit Reigl, Guano (1957). Oil on canvas, 184.8 x 240.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, U.S.A.