Rating and value of paintings by Judit Reigl

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Rating and value of the artist Judit Reigl   

Judit Reigl is a well-known artist among modern and contemporary art lovers. Now, prices for her works are rising at the auctioneers' gavel.

Her oils on canvas are particularly prized, especially by American buyers, and the price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €100 to €340,000, a significant delta but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to the artist's works.

In 2016, his oil on canvas Éclatement dating from 1955 sold for €340,000, while it was estimated at between €200,000 and €300,000. His value is rising sharply. 

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The works and style of Judit Reigl

In 1955, in Éclatement, Judit Reigl chose to abandon any premeditated construction in favor of a gush of matter, projected, scraped, stretched in fluid sheets across the canvas.

Painting, now subject only to the logic of gesture, unfolds in a space where the surface, far from being a mere support, becomes a field of experimentation.

The impact of Action Painting, combined with a desire to go beyond the limits of the traditional frame, leads him to work on the ground, to inscribe in the material the imprint of movement, to replace composition with a process of accumulation and erasure.

Formlessness, here, is given as a necessity, a transitory state where the image occurs without being imposed. 

In the Guano, successive repaints sediment the surface, accumulating strata until the canvas is transformed into an uneven topography. The material, deposited, scraped, superimposed, becomes the site of a dialogue between chance and mastered intervention.

Later, with the Déroulements and the Hommes, the body itself becomes integrated into the pictorial act: traversing the canvas, Reigl inscribes the rhythm of her own presence, substituting the whole body for the hand as the instrument of tracing.

The gesture, amplified, then achieves a new monumentality where the line is liberated, where painting becomes pure movement. Here again, the unity of the surface takes precedence over any distinction between figure and background: the canvas, traversed, invested, is no longer a space of representation, but the site of an inscription where body and matter merge in an inseparable continuum.

The life of Judit Reigl

Judit Reigl (1923 - 2020), was a French artist of Hungarian origin, who produced figurative, then surrealist, then finally abstract works.

In 1950, after several unsuccessful attempts to flee Communist Hungary, Judit Reigl managed to cross the Iron Curtain to Italy, where she stayed briefly before settling in Paris.

Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, and steeped in the frescoes of Giotto and Piero della Francesca discovered during a trip to Italy in 1947, she approached painting with a freedom that the political context of her home country denied her.

On her arrival in France, she was welcomed by Simon Hantaï, who introduced her to André Breton. Seduced by the raw energy of her canvases, the poet invited her to exhibit at the gallery À l'Étoile scellée in 1954, briefly integrating the artist into the Surrealist group.

But Reigl, averse to any doctrinal allegiance, soon distanced herself from the movement and devoted herself to a pictorial research based on instinct, gesture and matter.From 1955, her Éclatements marked a turning point: painting, projected onto the canvas, responds to a logic of flow in which the body is fully engaged. Movement takes precedence, abolishing all premeditation in favor of an immediate relationship with the material.

This was followed by the Guano series, where the superimposition of layers lends the work an almost organic density, Écritures en masse, where the sign melts into the rhythm of the pictorial act, or Déroulements, where the spreading of pigment scans the surface of the canvas in a continuous dynamic.

Installed in Marcoussis, she refines an approach in which the body becomes the true driving force behind creation, engaging the artist in a physical dialogue with paint. Far from established frameworks, her work stands out as a quest for the absolute, a journey where the canvas becomes the site of reconquered freedom, freed from all dogma.

Judit Reigl and Jean Degottex - Mise en perspective

Focus on Écriture en masse, Judit Reigl, 1973 - 1975, and Sans titre (Suite Papiers d'Asie), Jean Degottex, 1974

The two works chosen here stand out first and foremost for a novel approach to gesture and writing.

Reigl, in Écriture en masse, inscribes his work in a gesture that is both dynamic and explosive, thanks to which the ink seems to spurt out with uncontrolled energy. The painter's body becomes a direct medium between mind and canvas, allowing the work to resemble automatic writing.

With Degottex's Sans Titre (Suite Papiers d'Asie), we witness the exploration of a refined, meditative calligraphy. His style is close to Zen aesthetics and the Japanese calligraphic gesture - each stroke is laid down with precision, in a quest for emptiness and silence.

As far as the relationship to pictorial space is concerned, this is saturated by accumulations of matter in Reigl's work, with stains and imprints of rapid movement, giving off an impression of structured chaos, where the artist finds his balance in the intensity of gesture.

Degottex adopts a different prism, letting the paper breathe, and creating zones of silence and emptiness - echoing the principles of oriental calligraphy. Space becomes an active element that proves just as essential as the stroke itself.

On the side of material and support, Reigl works with paint in a fluid, spontaneous manner, with splashes and impastos that convey a total physical commitment to the pictorial act.

In an almost automatic movement, the artist sprays ink and paint onto the canvas.

Degottex favors a more controlled, minimalist application, playing with the dilution and transparency of inks on paper, giving particular importance to texture, but also to the effects of matter, in a more rigorous economy of means.

The two artists do not have the same relationship to abstraction and spirituality: painting is an act of liberation of gesture for Reigl - who builds abstraction in an almost instinctive spontaneity, in a visceral and physical approach that translates a vital energy imprinted on the canvas.

As for Degottex, his art is conceived as a quest for the essence of the line. His abstraction is close to a spiritual and meditative approach, where the slightest sign carries meaning.

As a result, although both artists share the same gestural approach to painting, they are on two distinct registers : one in impulse and explosion, the other in purity and restraint.

They both engage in a dialogue with abstraction, rooted in a writing of the body and gesture, yet pursuing different ends. In Reigl's case, a raw energy, combined with Degottex's quest for purity.

Judit Reigl's stylistic influences

Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, steeped in the frescoes of Giotto and Piero della Francesca discovered on a trip to Italy, Judit Reigl approaches painting with a keen sense of composition and mass balance.

But it is in the immediacy of gesture and the physicality of the pictorial act that she sets her own course. While Surrealism welcomed her for a time, she quickly turned away from it to explore a style of painting in which the whole body is involved.

American Action Painting, notably Rauschenberg, Pollock and De Kooning, offers it an echo, as does the European matierist research of Fautrier and Wols.

Refusing to belong to any defined current, she forges a body of work where matter becomes language, where the freedom of gesture meets a quest to surpass, asserting an instinctive and physical painting, freed from all constraints.

Her signature

Not all Judit Reigl's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here's a first example of her signature:

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