The Brooklyn Rail

When viewing the 23 paintings, masks, and costumes that comprise Eva Beresin’s exhibition OffStage, one navigates intersecting characteristics of theatre and painting. Offstage is comprised of works Beresin painted onstage amidst 11 performances of the play Alte Meisterin, a theatrical reimagining of the life of Maria Lassnig produced by makemake produktionen and directed by Sara Ostertag.

Berensin’s approach to the paintings varied, some synced with the script, others open-ended. The first 12 completed works, identical in format, titled Nineteen Minutes, were each over-painted in precisely 19 minutes. Setting the tone of collaboration, the base layer consists of a black-and-white enlarged UV print featuring Maria Lassnig and members of the Filmmakers, Inc. collective, including Carolee Schneemann, from 1976.

The paintings reveal the struggle to claim mental, emotional, professional, and historical territory for these two artists across two eras. The images depict chaotic, carnival-like creatures in a rowdy procession that seems to be running wild, like an entourage that has overstayed its welcome, haunting Berensin’s character.

During rehearsals, the painter said she felt “like a speck of dust in the wind” amidst the young Feminist troupe. One suspects this sensation is Beresin’s usual starting point. The quick and skilled output is a testament to the artist’s ability to focus amidst the cramped stage environment with actors, musicians, while facing a live audience, as they channelled memories of Lassnig. Her childhood in Communist Hungary and her chilling family history, suggest a likely source of resilience and focus regardless of the environment.

From self-effacing awkwardness to playful exhibitionism, the painted portrayals of her shape-shifting likeness remain charming yet disarming. Her painted protagonist is thrown from one work to the next, enduring the allegorical trials and triumphs of the artist’s life. Once immersed, it's impossible to look away, even as the characterization articulates nightmarish generational trauma.

A dialogue is most evident in You or me or both of us?, Beresin’s altered motif of Lassnig’s 2005 You or Me. Beresin’s self-portrait shows the painter with a gun held to their head in her left hand, while in her right we see a revolver aiming directly toward the viewer. Created late in her career, Lassnig’s original version is sparse and confrontational. The frontal nudity of the pose and her defiant expression, challenges the viewer with an implicit threat.

With You or me or both of us, Beresin’s pistol play pushes Lassnig’s Body Awareness concept towards the erotic, zeroing in on her desperation. The paradoxical complexity achieved within the parameters of this painting is formidable. As in many of her works, the structure is mapped out by an arrangement of orbs, anxious eyes, or the black hole of a handgun’s barrel, echoed within the solitary eye of a hovering giant orange bird. Safe beneath the painter’s spreading legs—a neurotic puppy repeats the pose, clinging to Bersin's trademark oversized feet.

Uniting these focus points with fuzzy brown paint, we see a second humanoid puppy and other creatures in orbit. The painter’s vagina is the axis of this fraught composition, and any hysteria it may trigger. This perverse game of Russian Roulette is over-crowded, yet the house always wins.

Inspired by Lassnig’s Self-portrait with Pickle Jar, 1971, in which the object references the absence of children in Lassnig’s life. Beresin’s piece shows a jar labelled Ghürkchen, from which a green creeper grows towards the figure's pelvis. In contrast to Lassnig's cradling a substitute prop, Eva holds an anxious pale baby, her horrified stare through oversized glasses, reflecting unspoken maternal ambivalence.

Beresin refers to her history as the child of Holocaust Survivors who grew up in Communist Hungary, in the painting Coming into existence every morning. The artwork features a drab green and orange harlequin-patterned floor directing our attention to a nude figure with a shaved head. She holds a smudged gun to her temple, while pointing a Luger at a frightened dog hiding under a bed. Next to the Luger, a vivid blue palette resembles the skull from Edvard Munch’s Scream, which is turned sideways.

The eyes in this painting observe from various perspectives, focusing on Beresin as she peers over the hairless head, representing either herself or her mother, as a prisoner in Auschwitz. This figure gazes at the death-skull palette, a symbol of unspeakable horror and premonition of collective amnesia.

Dominating the left side is a second self-portrait, hiding her face behind a camera aimed at the viewer, potentially capturing hidden horrors to come. The message may question the conditioned reflex of photography, and the numbing reduction of history into easy reproductions that diminish with mechanical repetition.

Beresin’s matrilineal sub-text was evident from her debut exhibition, My Mother’s Diary, Ninety-Eight Pages. This meticulous transcription of 98 faded diary pages, chronicles her mother and grandmother’s long and harrowing journey back to Budapest in 1945, where her worst fears were confirmed; no other family members had survived, including her mother’s fiancé. Beresin’s quest to make a “reconstruction of the content” had a cathartic effect, which “meant a more intensive closeness than anything I had ever felt for my mother.”

Ninety-Eight Pages is a transformative work, possessing a symbolic power which aided the artist’s daily existence, a reminder that nascent nightmares are real. The darkest implications echo Maria Lassnig’s 1973 Self-Portrait with a Telephone, an image implying no object is innocent. Lassnig’s auto-portrait contemplates a green 70’s landline, possessing just enough cable which she has wrapped around her neck.

During the project, a detail had come to light: Lassnig graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1945, the same year Eva Beresin’s mother was liberated from Auschwitz, a brutal fact that took Beresin by surprise.

Beresin’s detached self-irony and humour are her superpower, which Lassnig also employed, more so in her films than in her paintings. Offstage is an exhibition of Beresin shapeshifting playfully with complex and loaded material, but not for the first time. Like Lassnig, this painter’s existential self-portraits are challenging viewing habits in the face of uncomfortable truths. The work seems to ask, who is observing whom in this multidimensional zoo we call the world, or reality, or whatever.

Her sensibility puts her in the company of Rego, Guston, Colescott or even the literature of Franz Kafka. It has been said that Kafka laughed hysterically when reading his works to friends; a perfect Tourette's survival tip for surviving the absurdities of the 20^th century, and beyond.

The matrilineal line drawn from the artist’s seminal work, Ninety-Eight Pages, shows resilience in a shared, yet secret knowledge spanning generations—an unbroken bond passed from mother to daughter through the power of laughter, two identically spelled words separated by a single letter.