Eva Beresin lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Born in 1955 in Budapest, Hungary, she grew up surrounded by her father’s extensive art collection, gaining early access to a wide visual archive. Her practice is defined by grotesque humour, self-irony, and melancholy - sensibilities shaped across her life and work, informed by fragments of 1960s counterculture and experiences under the Soviet system. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before moving to Vienna in 1976, where she worked for many years outside institutional frameworks, exhibiting from the early 2000s in independently produced, transdisciplinary off-space projects.

Since 2015, Beresin has been represented by Charim Galerie, Vienna. That year she presented works based on her mother’s diary written after liberation from Auschwitz, resulting in Ninety-Eight Pages (Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2015). From 2019 onward, she developed self-portraits on vintage fashion magazines, inserting her body into layered historical and cultural contexts. These works explore identity, inherited trauma, and visibility through the collision of contemporary imagery and historical memory, often staging hybrid, exaggerated figures. Animals increasingly appear as alter egos and projections of self.

Beresin frames Instagram as a kind of contemporary “coffeehouse culture" reflecting her early fascination with Budapest’s Café Gerbeaud - an interest rooted in childhood, when her parents brought her there and she developed a habit of close observation. Her work has gained increasing recognition, including her first institutional solo exhibition Thick Air at the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2024), accompanied by a Hatje Cantz publication. In late 2024, she participated in a theatre production based on the life and work of Maria Lassnig, painting works on stage, extending her interest in biography and constructed identity. Recent works reference Viennese visual culture, particularly the Hotel Sacher and the Vienna Opera Ball, through saturated reds and staged interiors. A new monograph is in preparation with Skira Editore.

"My work is the constant attempt to translate the images in my head. The banal, everyday or fleetingly-perceived have the same status as phantasias or images from art history. I am impatient and want to make the pictures in my head visible in my own visual language as quickly as possible, so the pictures are never finished, but rather remain in a continuous process. The overpainting, the use and experimentation with different materials - such as collage, photography and painting - are an expression of what seems important to me at the moment, a narrative form that is only safe from myself when I hand it over in a further process of change. Invisible figures, people either in motion or standing in front of each other commingle. They are mostly female figures - my own engagement with femininity and sexuality, history and the questioning of painting."