Judit Reigl

Judit Reigl studied at Hungarian University of Fine Arts. The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is painting and surrealism. Places of work recorded in the authority are France. Work by Judit Reigl is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Tate, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Musée d'art moderne de Paris. Distinctions recorded are Kossuth Prize, Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Knight of the National Order of Merit and Prix Aware.

• Name — Judit Reigl • Born — 1 May 1923 • Birthplace — Kapuvár, Hungary • Died — 7 August 2020 • Place of death — Marcoussis, France • Field — Painter • Movement — Abstract Expressionism • Website — judit-reigl.com

Reigl was born on 1 May 1923 in Kapuvár, Hungary. She attended the Hungarian University of Fine Arts from 1942 to 1945 where she was the student of the celebrated painter István Szőnyi. She was awarded a scholarship from the Academy of Hungary in Rome which allowed her to study in Italy between 1947 and 1948. During her studies there she encountered Byzantine icons, the mosaics of Ravenna, the works of Giotto and Masaccio and the paintings of Venice's Giorgione and Titian amongst others. In 1950, when the Iron Curtain had divided Hungary and Western Europe, Reigl succeeded in crossing into Western Europe after eight previous attempts. She explained that her home country of Hungary solely commissioned her to paint portraits of ruling Communist leaders such as Stalin, Rákosi and Gerő, and so her defection to the West was necessary to preserve her artistic freedom. Reigl eventually reached Paris by crossing through Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium where she lived from 1950 to 1963. In 1963 she moved to Marcoussis (Île-de-France). Reigl acquired French nationality by naturalization. She died on 7 August 2020 in Marcoussis, France.

Reigl's early works from her Surrealist period combine elements of photo collage with a mixture of figurative and more abstract elements (Incomparable Pleasure, 1952–53). She later expanded her use of collages from 1953 to 1955 using images from popular magazines and newspapers. Although these smaller photo collages weren't included in her inaugural exhibition at André Breton's galerie À l'Étoile scellée, they still align with the Surrealist movement through their bizarre juxtapositions, dreamlike scenarios and transfigured bodies. Most of her paintings which were included in the show at galerie À l'Étoile scellée are more abstract, the exhibited canvases were Reigl's first experimentation with automatic writing, a technique that recurs in various forms throughout her oeuvre. Reigl's automatism arode from instinctive gestures of her body and showcases movement, levitation, tension and changes in processes, rhythms and roots of existence on spectacular large canvases. Figurative- and non-figurative representation was for her a question of encoding and de-coding but may also be anthropomorphic. Reigl used her body as her primary instrument when creating the series Outburst (Éclatement) which she began in 1955. The Outbursts series is different from her earlier paintings with automatic writing in that they no longer used improvised metal tools to make spontaneous gestural marks. She began with throwing thick industrial pigment mixed with linseed oil onto the canvas with her hands and continued by vigorously scraping it from the center to the edges with a tool. In a 1956 Outburst in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the relatively spare composition is punctuated by thick impastos or forceful marks. The artist later explained this time in her life as a transitional period when she severed her ties with the Surrealists. The Outbursts are explosions of mass, radiating from a center as bursts of pure energy. For her following series Mass Writing (Écriture en masse), Reigl applied large volumes of thick, slow-drying black pigment to the canvas using a blade or a stick, and then painted with upward strokes. In these works, the black areas are dispersed outward toward the edges of the canvas. While working on these canvases, Reigl inadvertently began in 1958 working on an innovative oeuvre of paintings called Guanos, in which she reworked rejected canvases that had been covering the floor of her studio. The textured surface of these paintings evoke the archeological which was further affirmed by the artist herself when she referred to the canvases becoming "fertile ground" for new paintings. Some of her subsequent series include Man, Drap/décodage and Facing... (Face à...). They display Reigl's desire for liberation from her own body by investigating the human figure. Other Reigl series such as Writings after Music (Écritures d'après musique) and Unfolding (Déroulement) are based around the central theme of music. In Writings after Music, she transcribes musical notes into concrete visual signs. Scholars characterize the creative process of Unfolding as a type of dance in which the artist develops a unique form of visual calligraphy by combining gesture and innovative painting techniques. Reigl's work is in the collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hungarian National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, and the Toledo Museum of Art. Reigl's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Judit Reigl was born on 1 May 1923 in Kapuvár. Reigl held the nationality of France and Hungary. Reigl worked as painter and artist. Reigl was active from 1950 to 2012. Reigl worked in France. Reigl worked in French.

• Guggenheim International Award (New York City, 1964) • Carnegie Award (Pittsburgh, 1967–68) • Commander's Cross of Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (Budapest, 2008) • Kossuth Prize (Budapest, 2011)