My body plays the game
Ruled by “I”.
The rule of I, I of Reigl;
Determined. Determinant.
A particle of the Universe…
A particle of the Universe
Is the Universe.
– Judit Reigl, 7 April 1985
Judit Reigl’s work is both entirely of its time and extremely singular.
Born in Kapuvar in Hungary in 1923, Judit Reigl went to Budapest in 1941 and enrolled in the Fine Arts School there. ‘I borrowed from all the other students who interested me. I was on the ball, but I was always honest,’ she said in an interview. After the interruption of the war, she began studying again in 1945, and travelled to Italy in 1946 with a bursary from the Hungarian Academy in Rome. She will be deeply marked by the site-specific works of the Renaissance and Baroque masters she discovered there. In Ravenna, Reigl met the English poet and sculptor Betty Anderson (1911-2007), who became her life partner.
When she returned to Hungary in 1948, Reigl found the country in the grip of an authoritarian Communist regime. She decided to flee, and finally passed through the Iron Curtain on the 10th of March 1950, after eight failed attempts. It took her three atrocious months to reach Paris, where she was taken in by the expat Hungarian community (Simon Hantaï, his wife, and Antal Biro) and moved into a studio in La Ruche.
‘My whole body of work is a single series, from age three to the present. [...] The truth is that for my entire life, I have never done anything other than paint, or try to paint as soon as I had the chance.’
In 1954, André Breton discovered Reigl’s painting Ils ont soif insatiable de l’infini. He wrote to her: ‘I believe you have it in you to make immense accomplishments’ and offered to show her work at the gallery À l’Étoile scellée. This will be a decisive encounter for Reigl.