[3] During her studies there she encountered Byzantine icons, the mosaics of Ravenna, the works of Giotto and Masaccio and the paintings of Venice's Giorgione and Titian amongst others.

[5] She explained that her home country of Hungary solely commissioned her to paint portraits of ruling Communist leaders such as Stalin, Rákosi and Gerő, and so her defection to the West was necessary to preserve her artistic freedom.

Reigi had a relatively short phase of focusing on surrealism but she would become an important bridge between surrealists and the younger generation of artists that would be associated with lyrical abstraction in the future.

Both series garnered Reigl much success in France as well as in West Germany and in the United States, where she familiarized herself with the American Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

Although these smaller photo collages weren't included in her inaugural exhibition at André Breton's galerie À l'Étoile scellée, they still align with the Surrealist movement through their bizarre juxtapositions, dreamlike scenarios and transfigured bodies.

Most of her paintings which were included in the show at galerie À l'Étoile scellée are more abstract, the exhibited canvases were Reigl's first experimentation with automatic writing, a technique that recurs in various forms throughout her oeuvre.

Reigl's automatism arode from instinctive gestures of her body and showcases movement, levitation, tension and changes in processes, rhythms and roots of existence on spectacular large canvases.

The Outbursts series is different from her earlier paintings with automatic writing in that they no longer used improvised metal tools to make spontaneous gestural marks.

She began with throwing thick industrial pigment mixed with linseed oil onto the canvas with her hands and continued by vigorously scraping it from the center to the edges with a tool.

Scholars characterize the creative process of Unfolding as a type of dance in which the artist develops a unique form of visual calligraphy by combining gesture and innovative painting techniques.