Judit riegl biography channel

Judit Reigl was born in Kapuvár, Hungary on 1 May 1923. Reigl studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest between 1941 and 1945. In 1947, Reigl procured an Italian visa to attend the Hungarian Academy in Rome, where she hitch-hiked to major towns to study the Old Masters and visited the Venice Biennale in 1948.

She returned to Hungary later that year, which had been taken over by a Soviet authoritarian regime.

Judit riegl biography channel 7

In March 1950, she clandestinely crossed the Iron Curtain to escape the ascent of Stalinism and reached Paris, where she met the painter Simon Hantaï. He introduced Reigl to André Breton, who organised her first solo exhibition at the Étoile Scellée gallery in 1954.

After this first association with the Surrealists, Reigl detached herself from the movement and started experimenting with a more individual form of gestural painting – monochrome grounds, marked with palette-knife and blade scrapings.

Whilst in Paris, Reigl was