Eva Beresin | Transfer

The exhibition of new paintings by Eva Beresin at Charim Events takes as its subject experiences that condensed into images over the course of a journey. She writes: “In my artistic work I follow a constant desire to translate images from my head and make them visible. They are mostly female figures, expressing my engagement and identification with femininity, sexuality, the history of my family and the questioning of painting per se. The works shown in this exhibition were all made before and after a trip to Auschwitz in summer 2019. It was organised by a team from the Universalmuseum Joanneum Graz under the motto ‘Between Culture of Remembrance and Mass Tourism’. Being able to make this journey was a unique opportunity for me to pursue my long-held wish to visit the concentration camp where a large part of my family was murdered and where my mother survived.”

Eva Beresin’s new pictures are small in format, partly because they are painted on pages from a fashion magazine, which Eva Beresin transforms into her pictures with oil paint, retracing poses and gestures. She shows herself, and in more than one sense. Where previously it was pictures from her mother’s family album and her mother’s return from the Ravensbrück concentration camp to a new life, it is now Eva Beresin herself. It is her body and her feelings that find their counterpart in the lightness of the new paintings. The motifs taken from fashion magazines opened up a path for her that brought the engagement with the past into a dialogue with the artist’s concrete present-day life: “… I placed my body, as it were, in that time and that place in order to walk in the footsteps of my family. In my paintings I show myself partly naked and vulnerable in order to enter into a dialogue with those I was never able to know. My courage in depicting all this so explicitly makes me laugh and has a calming effect. For despite all the efforts of those who brought murder and annihilation to this place back then, we are still here.”

“I am still here”, one might well add, and the paintings are to be understood as joyful self-assertion and a relish for life. Eva Beresin goes on to write: “The feeling of having been there too, if only a little, seems to answer at least some of the many questions I have about it.”

In the works and in the motifs drawn from her own biography and present-day life, the political becomes tangible as the personal. Not with a grand gesture but almost playfully and with great soul, Eva Beresin tells of the good fortune of survival, which no longer has to be burdened with guilt and has turned into a joy of living.