This book is a first monograph dedicated to the Hungarian artist Ilona Keserü who celebrated her 90th birthday in 2023. With a career extending over seventy years, Keserü is one of the most significant post-war female abstract artists. Her distinctive approach combines references to Hungarian folk culture and European modern art history. The artist’s organic abstract style developed after the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Her liberal use of forms and bold palette expressed a refusal to conform to Soviet ideals. In the second half of the 1960s, Ilona Keserü began experimenting more intensively with different materials and techniques. It was then that motifs alluding to her female identity were given increasing emphasis in her art – before and independently of the emerging second-wave feminism. Keserü’s sensual abstractions hinge on the edge of figuration. The use of bright and vibrant colours, her name is inextricably linked to, has always been the result of scientific and artistic experiments.

ILONA KESERÜ (*1933 in Pécs, Hungary) graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Budapest in 1958 (the István Szőnyi fresco painting studio). Keserü initially worked as an illustrator. She started exhibiting her art in the mid-1960s and participated in the important exhibitions that formed the so-called Iparterv generation. In parallel, she began developing her career as a theatre designer. Since 1983, she taught at the University of Pécs and then became one of the founders of the Master School of Fine Arts in Pécs. Recently, her works have been included in exhibitions featuring the most important abstract artist such as "Women in Abstraction" at Center Pompidou, Paris, among others. She lives and works in Budapest.