Lecture by Ágnes Berecz art historian at JUDIT REIGL 100 | JUDIT REIGL AND THE SECOND SCHOOL OF PARIS exhibition.

BESIDES PARIS AND BERLIN, A CENTENARY WILL BE HELD IN THE MŰCSARNOK IN BUDAPEST: PAYING TRIBUTE TO JUDIT REIGL, THE HUNGARIANBORN PAINTER CELEBRATED WORLDWIDE

Besides Paris and Berlin, Budapest will also pay tribute to Judit Reigl, a painter born in Hungary 100 years ago. Celebrating the onehundredth anniversary of her birth, exhibitions will open at several venues in Hungary displaying the works of one of the internationally most renowned contemporary artists of Hungarian origin. The most important of these will be organised in autumn in the Műcsarnok.

REIGL 100, to be held in the largest halls of the Műcsarnok, will display more than 60 paintings, representing the major periods in the artists oeuvre, including some really special pieces: works that thus far had been missing, as well as compositions loaned from abroad by numerous prominent collections. The show will be the crowning event of the centenary. The masterpieces and many other works not yet exhibited in Hungary can be viewed by visitors on an area of 1,700 square metres.

The displayed works will include real curiosities: paintings representing the Second School of Paris from the collection of a Swiss collector and patron, Jean Claude Gandur. Similarly unique are Judit Reigl’s figurative works, which she painted during her scholarship years in Rome, as they fill in an art historical hiatus.

Her life full of twists and turns and her uncompromising artistic approach alone would make Judit Reigl an extraordinary artist, but it is thanks to her seminal oeuvre that she is now among the world’s most recognised contemporary painters.

Judit Reigl, born on 1 May 1923 in Kapuvár, emigrated to Paris in 1950, where her surrealist works brought her one success after the other. Then, looking for new paths and being ahead of her time, she created works that took her to abstract art. It was after her first domestic oeuvre exhibition, organised in 2005 in the impressive halls of the Műcsarnok, that her art was given renewed recognition, and from then on her star rose like a comet. Today she is regarded as one of the most innovative painters of all time. Her works are displayed at solo and group shows in the world’s most important private and public collections, while also being included in prominent permanent exhibitions, including that of the Metropolitan Museum (MET), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Modern in London. Judit Reigl was still active at the age of 90. She died on 6 August 2020.

Collaborative partner: Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts

The sponsor of the exhibition is the Pallas Athena Domus Meriti Foundation.