From Budapest in Hungary artist Eva Beresin has exhibited her work from Vienna to New York.

 

Her love for painting stems from weekly visits to Café Gerbeaud in Budapest where she would love to watch passersby. Especially older ladies with their wild makeup and styling.

 

Eva Beresin thinks fast, paints fast and has a quick sense of humor. Her personal style is that of a funky teen; but you'd be sorely mistaken if you were fooled or put off by the apparent frivolity of her enterprise. Her skills are razor sharp and underlie a deep thoughtfulness and intelligence. Her paintings cloak both herself and various members of her immediate family in lighthearted, riotously colorful scenarios, often of the domestic variety. As most of our relatives are so universally . . . umm . . . "special," need we look any further?

 

The mundane daily occurrences of life, shopping, sharing meals and playing games together come across as funny-mostly by way of cartoonishly distorted, engorged hands, feet, and facial features. Yet lurking not too far underneath the surface, the images are imbued with a more melancholic notion of the absurd, grotesque, and forlorn.

 

The wedding of humor and horror-contradictory impulses wherein one laughs in the face of impending old age, bodily decay, and sundry tragedies-are survival methods, defense mechanisms in a world typified by gratuitous violence and unprovoked death; something I can readily relate to since entering similar, excessively unpleasant territory myself. But ageing, however ungracefully, is better than the alternative . . . I think.

 

Beresin brings to mind, more than any other artist for me, the works of Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1949). Little-traveled in his lifetime, he dwelt in a bizarre, wildly colorful landscape, primarily peopled by those closest to him. Ensor's art was characterized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan as conveying an acute sense of aggressive sarcasm and scatology, sentiment that equally applies to Beresin. Eva replaces the masks frequently featured in Ensor's works with everyday faces of her friends, family, and a potpourri of crazed looking animals resembling anything other than a state of flattery.

 

Eva Beresin's paintings are equal measure seductive, hilarious and disturbing. While being lulled into a false sense of comforting entertainment, Eva hits us over the head after luring us in with her unparalleled, unbridled symbolically violent and unsettling imagery-nothing less than a thoroughly enjoyable horror show!

 

- Kenny Schachter, 2021

 

Eva Beresin (b. 1955, Budapest, Hungary) received her degree from the School of Fine Art in Budapest. Recent solo exhibitions include: All About Eva (and Me) at Charim Galerie, Vienna and Nothing everything is special, OOPS Kenny Schachter (online). Beresin's work was exhibited in recent group shows at Galerie Nagel Draxler (Cologne) and Philipp Zollinger Galerie (Zurich). Her monograph, My Mother's Diary: Ninety Eight Pages, was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst in 2019, and presents Beresin's paintings that were based on her mother's journal written after her liberation from Auschwitz. Eva Beresin lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

 

Eva Beresin took part in ‘LUCKY CHARM’ a Group Exhibition of 28 International Artists. Presented by Lisa Boudet in association with Moosey Art. Opening the 4th of November 2021 at Hoxton Arches in London, United Kingdom.