Judit Reigl (1923-2020) was a Hungarian-born French artist, who achieved great acclaim for an oeuvre that included abstract, figurative, Surrealist and gestural works. Despite her success, categorising her work has challenged art critics, as Reigl did not wish to have her art boxed in within any one movement. Fortunately, this has not prevented appreciation of her work and in 2015, five years prior to her passing away, Robbanás (1956), from the series Éclatement, meaning Explosion, was the most expensive painting sold by a living artist of Hungarian origin. In 2023, it is the centenary of the artist’s birth, and in order to commemorate the occasion, as well as the gift of three works from the artist’s estate – Center of Dominance (1959), Mass Writing (1960), and the triptych Man (1967–69) – the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin presented the artist’s first solo show in Germany, titled Judit Reigl, Centers of Dominance (June 30-November 26, 2023). The exhibition was organised by Maike Steinkamp, an art historian and curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and explored Reigl’s evolving aesthetics and creative preoccupations from the 1950s to the 1980s through 16 large-scale works.

Of the many European nations that have held exhibitions of Reigl’s works, Germany holds a particular significance for the artist’s career: her first show here was in 1957, featuring five works from her Outburst and Center of Dominance series, as part of the group show Lebendige Farbe – Couleur Vivante at the Museum Wiesbaden. This was a landmark exhibition that introduced the Art Informel movement, originating in France, to German audiences, with Reigl the only woman represented.

The show was highly acclaimed, with Reigl’s works standing out. As Steinkamp mentions in a curatorial essay for the Centers of Dominance art exhibition, in 1958, Clemens Weiler, who curated the Wiesbaden exhibition wrote: “Time and again, visitors to the exhibition, which had cleared the way for young art in Germany, were fascinated more than anything else by Judit Reigl’s paintings.” Despite this early interest however, the Hungarian painter never held a solo museum exhibition in Germany in her lifetime. Steinkamp hopes Centers of Dominance will rekindle interest in her work within the nation.

While the solo exhibition highlights various series of Reigl’s works, including Outburst, Center of Dominance, Guano, Mass Writing and Weightlessness, it also attempts to establish a common thread among the 16 works being displayed. That is the artist’s pursuit of a physical and intuitive relationship with her canvas every time she painted, which saw her focus on the tactility of her materials, the spontaneity of the strokes she made and the ways in which her own body responded to the painting process. Her process was, in a sense, an emotionally charged performance art undertaking that stretched across her artmaking career, most often only performed to an audience of herself and her canvas, with the results presented as paintings to the wider European art world. Without understanding this relationship between artist and canvas, one will likely find her oeuvre somewhat nebulous.

Steinkamp highlights her curatorial focus, telling STIR: “I tried to show through the exhibition, the development of Reigl's work by highlighting the constant element of her artistic approach, which is in my opinion, her physical, intuitive interaction with the canvas. In every series, she approached the canvas in another manner: She used different tools for applying the paint, worked on several artworks at the same time, accepted the human figure into her paintings (which appeared accidentally as she pointed out later), included music to see how her movement in front and on the canvas shifted, and so on.” 

The curator reaffirms that Reigl was always trying out new methods, but the constant thread among her works is this explorative relationship with her canvas that prompted her to constantly evolve her process over her career. Steinkamp elaborates on this in the essay, where she writes: “Judit Reigl never settled into a particular style, but instead found her own unique path. She kept changing and expanding her artistic universe throughout her life. Her lifelong concern was to free herself from boundaries and not to be forced into an art-historical corset. Perhaps this was the crux of the matter that caused her to be forgotten over the years.”

Going beyond the artist’s origin in Hungary and the history of artmaking in France, a solo German show could also be seen as a return to roots for Reigl, given how critical the 1957 Wiesbaden exhibition was for her. One hopes that this offering will succeed in reacquainting German audiences with Reigl’s work, placing a spotlight on one of the second half of the 20th century’s most fascinating artists.