Szárnyalás–Vol–Flight
Judit Reigl’s Figurative Painting
23 August 2023 – 27 October 2023
Curators: Júlia Cserba, János Gát, Enikő Róka
Szárnyalás-Vol-Flight. Judit Reigl’s Figurative Painting
Several European and Hungarian museums are organizing exhibitions to mark the hundredth anniversary of Judit Reigl’s birth. The showcase at the Kiscelli Museum—Municipal Gallery acts as a bridge between the exhibitions at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. While the Berlin exhibition highlights the artist’s most renowned period, surveying her paintings from the 1950s to the 1980s, the Budapest exhibition presents works from the early and final years of Reigl’s career.
The Kiscelli Museum exhibition focuses on the period in between, emphasizing for the first time the significance of human representation across Reigl’s entire oeuvre. Reigl regarded the successive—or overlapping, as she often continued adding to her works—phases of her artistic development as a single, organic process, making no distinction between abstraction and figuration. For a long time, however, critics were puzzled by the occasional appearance of figurative paintings, and her abstract works still attract considerably more attention.
This exhibition draws attention to Reigl’s series that have often been considered peripheral and little known, showing that her oeuvre can only be fully understood by including these works and exploring the artist’s consistent approach to thinking and creating.
Judit Reigl (1923-2020)
New York, 11 September 2001 (Suite de New York, 11 septembre 2001), 2006
mixed media on canvas, 203 x 140 cm
The art she encountered on her first trip to Italy left a lifelong impression, and she continued to visit museums and collect reproductions of works she considered important. A catacomb painting of the Resurrection of Lazarus in Rome, frescoes by Michelangelo, the works of Cézanne, Matisse, Malevich, Rothko, Egyptian sculpture, and the cave paintings in Lascaux—all these visual experiences are clearly reflected in her series Man (1966–1972), Drape—Decoding (1973), Entrance—Exit (1986–1988), Facing… (1988–1990), A Body in Plural (1990–1992), Out (1993–1999), Priceless Body (1999–2001), and A Body in Plural II (2008–2009), several of which are included in the exhibition.
“These bodies in heaven are not independent of the iconography of the ascension or resurrection. For me, the fundamental question is emergence and disappearance,” said the elderly artist reflecting on her career. Throughout her life, she explored space, the world of atoms, nothingness, the infinite, and the human being exposed to the forces of the universe—both as an existential concern and as a pictorial challenge. The atom, the photon, the planet—all these are as much bodies as humans or the creator: “A particle of the universe / The universe itself,” she wrote in 1985.
The intersection of the largest and the smallest, the individual and the cosmic, or—when it comes to painting—between abstraction and figuration, is always possible, as they are different, often simultaneous approaches to the same reality. Highlighting her figurative works in this exhibition does not imply they are separate from her oeuvre. On the contrary, by emphasizing their importance, the exhibition aims to place these pieces back into their original context.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Fonds de dotation Judit Reigl,
the Paris-based foundation that preserves the artist’s legacy and holds the copyright.