Charim Galerie

I am not sure how Eva and I actually met, other than the fact it was on Instagram – that great social media leveling platform, where the entrenched art world hierarchies have all but been obliterated. What is certain is how much I’ve grown to love not only the art of Hungarian-born, Vienna-based, Eva Beresin; but, even more so (if that’s possible), the artist herself – one of the kindest, most generous people I know. 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”, why look any further? But don’t be fooled. 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. Beresin explains: “I found myself unattractive for a lifetime – only my hands, feet, and skin were highlights [for me]. Maybe that’s why unconsciously it always comes out that way. Hands and especially feet have a very strong expression for me anyway. Both my parents [who suffered unspeakably in concentration camps] were extremely elegant and blessed with great taste.” The wedding of humor and horror, contradictory impulses wherein one laughs in the face of impending old age, bodily decay, and sundry tragedies, are nothing less than survival methods in a world typified by gratuitous violence and unprovoked death; Kenny Schachter (excerpt from text: Nothing (and Everything) Special: The Paintings of Eva Beresin)

Born in Budapest in 1955, parents both Holocaust survivors with art affinity father art collector. I got passionate about drawing and painting when I was a little child while I had to sit with my parents weekly at Café Gerbeaud in Budapest. I loved to observe the “old” ladies with her wild makeup and styling. After I finished the School of Visual Arts in Budapest I moved to Vienna. I have been working with different media for the past 43 years and I continuously showed my figurative painting at special locations. Charim Galerie Vienna has been representing me since 2015. 2015 they exhibited my biggest project there so far the artistic implementation of my mother’s diary as she wrote after her liberation from Auschwitz I only began to process it after her death. I got her still intact world from 1943 where Jews in Hungary could live in relative normality. Converted into my painting and a multi-layered representation of her history. I also published a book ” Ninety-Eight Pages ” with the publishing house “Verlag für moderne Kunst “ I’m addicted to Instagram it’s like a new coffeehouse culture, see and be seen, communication source of information platform. The majority of oy works from summer 2019 which was painted with oil colors directly onto old fashion magazines, depicts me and my perception of my body, which I place virtually within the time and location of Auschwitz in order to retrace my family’s tracks. Sometimes in the paintings, I am moving naked and vulnerable, in order to be able to start a dialogue with those I was never able to actually meet. I use subjects from fashion magazines because they are surprisingly easy to transfer to the extreme of the time.

Charim Galerie Wien was founded 1998 by Miryam Charim. Since the beginning Miryam Charim puts the focus of her gallery program on well known international artist in exchange with young emerging artist. The gallery represents participants of documenta and other various high profiled art events. Namely: Dorit Margreiter, Ingrid Wiener, Andreij Monastyrskij, Lisl Ponger, Dorothee Golz and Milica Tomic. The gallery also puts a spotlight on young emerging artists, showing works of them at various art fairs, establishing contacts to curators and collections, and introducing them to the wider art public. Artists from a younger generation are Markus Krottendorfer, Robert Muntean, Daniel Pitin, Roberta Lima and Tamuna Sirbiladze. Partly the gallery space is used as a platform and meeting place for young artists, writers, critics and political/social activists.