Eva Beresin (*1955, Budapest, Hungary) grew up surrounded by an extensive collection of art and objects, amassed by her father through obsessive collecting. His inclination provided her with early access to a vast mental landscape of imagery. Added to this was what filtered through to the young Beresin from the counterculture of the 1960s, despite the Iron Curtain. Her background, combined with the reality of the Soviet system, created the fertile ground for the development of Beresin’s grotesque comedy, which is equally rooted in melancholy. She completed her studies at the School of Fine Arts in Budapest before moving to Vienna in 1976. In the early 2000s, she repeatedly exhibited in independently produced, transdisciplinary exhibition projects in various off spaces in and around Vienna.

Since 2015, Beresin has been represented by Charim Galerie. In the same year, the gallery exhibited Beresin’s exploration of her mother’s diary, which her mother kept after her liberation from Auschwitz. The book “Ninety-Eight Pages” was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst (first edition 2015). The Albertina dedicated her first solo exhibition “Thick Air” to Beresin’s work in May-September 2024, accompanied by a publication of the same name, and published by Hatje Cantz.

"Eva Beresin's paintings pose a stealthily radical exposure of the non-entities and inconsequential moments of intimate domestic life. Beresin's practice is informed by her impulse towards rendering stories deeply rooted in the most harrowing moments of human history and infusing them with a levity and satire that raids the borders of saccharine cuteness and the grotesque. As we bear witness to these comic-tragic friezes, the banally domestic and uncomfortably intimate scenes confront us with female carnal exposure, beguile us with their abject humour and seduce us with the uncanny familiarity of the hypnotically grotesque. Denying any clear orientation by dismantling encoded moral binaries, the rendering of sins otherwise here reveals Beresin's wilfully contradictory register of human behaviour."

- Rachel Falconer, BOMB Magazine, 2022