Ilona Keserü

Spectacular colour spaces

Hungarian painter Ilona Keserü celebrated her 90th birthday in 2023. With a career spanning seven decades, she is one of the most important abstract artists of the postwar period, to whom this first comprehensive monograph is dedicated. Keserü's painting combines elements of Hungarian folk culture with motifs from European modernism. With an organic-abstract style in bold colors and forms, she set herself apart from the state-prescribed Socialist Realism in the 1950s, the time of the Hungarian Revolution. In the following decade, Keserü began to experiment with different materials and techniques. Motifs alluding to her female identity increasingly came to the fore—even before and independently of the emerging second-wave feminism. The bright colors of her sensual abstractions are always the result of scientific and artistic experimentation.