Judit Reigl

 

 Judit Reigl (1923 - 2020) was a Hungarian painter who lived in France.
Most of her paintings which were included in the show at galerie À l'Étoile scellée are more abstract, the exhibited canvases were Reigl's first experimentation with automatic writing, a technique that recurs in various forms throughout her oeuvre. Reigl's automatism arode from instinctive gestures of her body and showcases movement, levitation, tension and changes in processes, rhythms and roots of existence on spectacular large canvases. Figurative- and non-figurative representation was for her a question of encoding and de-coding but may also be anthropomorphic.
Reigl used her body as her primary instrument when creating the series Outburst  which she began in 1955. The Outbursts series is different from her earlier paintings with automatic writing in that they no longer used improvised metal tools to make spontaneous gestural marks. She began with throwing thick industrial pigment mixed with linseed oil onto the canvas with her hands and continued by vigorously scraping it from the center to the edges with a tool. In a 1956 Outburst in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the relatively spare composition is punctuated by thick impastos or forceful marks. The artist later explained this time in her life as a transitional period when she severed her ties with the Surrealists. The Outbursts are explosions of mass, radiating from a center as bursts of pure energy.
For her following series Mass Writing , Reigl applied large volumes of thick, slow-drying black pigment to the canvas using a blade or a stick, and then painted with upward strokes. In these works, the black areas are dispersed outward toward the edges of the canvas. While working on these canvases, Reigl inadvertently began in 1958 working on an innovative oeuvre of paintings called Guanos, in which she reworked rejected canvases that had been covering the floor of her studio. The textured surface of these paintings evoke the archeological which was further affirmed by the artist herself when she referred to the canvases becoming "fertile ground" for new paintings.Wikipedia

 

 

 

Maria Lai - Italian Contemporary Art

 

 Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 – Cardedu, 2013) was one of the most singular voices in Italian art from World War II on.
Her special talent for drawing led her in 1939 to enrol in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, the only woman in those years to study sculpture under Arturo Martini. In the fifties, she moved to Rome, where she was able to observe various contemporary artistic developments, first through contacts with Art Informel and then, in the next decade, with the emergence of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. From these movements, she derived an interest in materials, both organic and those related to pre-industrial civilization, and in the gesture as a process, filtering these interests through an absolutely individual sensibility. From this period the relationship with the traditions of her land became central to her work, in a conceptual outlook with an anthropological matrix. Together with drawing, her output was enriched with subjects and materials close to an ancient, popular culture as in the case of her sculptures of bread, in itself a plain and perishable product, closely associated with everyday life and women’s work.
During the Seventies, the artist also created a series of works central to the development of her artistic language, which she called Telai (“Looms”), works that combined painting and sculpture and in which the age-old tradition of weaving was opened up to new compositional possibilities. The community, relational and memorial impulse finds its summation in the artist’s environmental interventions. (From MADRE, Naples site)

 

Joe Wesley Overstreet - American Contemporary Art

 

 Joe Wesley Overstreet (1933 – 2019) was an African-American painter from Mississippi who lived and worked in New York City for most of his career.In the 1950s and early 1960s he was associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, he became known for works such as Strange Fruit and The New Jemima, which reflected his interest in contemporary social issues and the Black Arts Movement. He also worked with Amiri Baraka as the Art Director for the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in Harlem, New York. In 1974 he co-founded Kenkeleba House, an East Village gallery and studio. In the 1980s he returned to figuration with his Storyville paintings, which recall the New Orleans jazz scene of the early 1900s. His work draws on a variety of influences, including his own African-American heritage, and has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world.