Eva Beresin

This first comprehensive monograph devoted to the work of Eva Beresin traces her practice unfolded over decades across painting and shifting political realities.This book is the first comprehensive monograph devoted to the work of Eva Beresin, tracing a practice that has unfolded over decades across painting and shifting political realities. Rooted in memory, biography, and historical rupture, Beresin’s work develops as a form of figurative narration marked by grotesque comedy, emotional exposure, and a persistent undertow of melancholy. Her paintings convey a fundamental ambivalence: their motifs often appear humorous or disarmingly light at first glance, only to reveal—on closer inspection—a melancholic absurdity, an intuited abyss. What emerges is a multilayered image of the artist herself, in which lightness, humour, and optimism coexist with trauma, violence, and disorientation, drawn from the inexhaustible reservoir of personal experience, memory, and imprint.Born in 1955 in Budapest, Beresin grew up surrounded by an obsessive collection of artworks and objects assembled by her father, granting her early access to a dense inner archive of images. This visual abundance was further shaped by fragments of Western counterculture that filtered through the Iron Curtain, colliding with the constraints, contradictions, and absurdities of the Soviet system. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, she moved to Vienna in 1976, where she later became a key figure in independent, transdisciplinary exhibition projects. Painting has remained her central medium. In the 2010s, a pivotal turn toward her family history—especially her mother’s post-Auschwitz diary—gave rise to works centered on female figures carrying trauma, desire, resilience, and dark humor, with memory, identity, and the interplay of personal and historical experience at their core.