Judit Reigl (b. 1923)

'In 1955, five years after leaving Hungary for Paris where she had been briefly associated with André Breton's Surrealist group, Judit Reigl began a new series to explore the process of painting as a dynamic and corporeal activity. The resulting works, collectively titled Éclatement (Outburst, 1955-57), feature masses of exploded paint that traverse the surface of the canvas tracing the movements of the artist's body in action First shown in December 1956 at the Galerie Kléber during Reigl's second Parisian solo exhibition, the series expanded on the Surrealist methods of automatism and employed what the artist calls 'automatic writing lived in its plenitude.' Departing from the purely interior, psychic model of automatism proposed by Breton, Reigl relied on the immediacy of the gesture and made the pictorial process and the body mutually dependent. Her violent, ephemeral, and amorphous marks substitute the mastery of the painter's hand with the contingency of the body, and together with their spacing and chromatic austerity appear to contaminate the radiance of the empty canvas'
(A. Berecz, 'Judit Reigl', Guggenheim Permanent Collection entry, reproduced at https://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-f ull/piece/?search=Outburst&page=&f=Title&object=2012.1).