Eva Beresin (b. 1955 in Budapest, HU) presents her second solo exhibition, Optimal anxiety, with Ruttkowski;68 in Paris.

Working from her home studio, Beresin created her newest body of work while caring for her husband through a period of illness. Restricted by circumstances of vigilance and dread, Beresin’s most recent works emerged from necessity. Spatially constrained, she turned to what was at hand: discarded fragments from past publications. Rescuing scraps of the past – splattered, torn apart, painted over, crushed, and reassembled – arose a six-metre-wide paper composition, forming the centrepiece of Beresin’s exhibition.

The work unfolds three-dimensionally, spilling onto the floor like decomposed architecture, taking shape in a self-made panic room, pieced together during brief windows of time that became urgent bursts of work. Worrying and reclusion, along with suspended movement, are inscribed into the material. Torn books and defaced pages bear echoes of personal and historical fractures, pointing to vulnerability and the disintegration of a world perceived in decay – from the global to the most private cell. Yet Beresin’s characteristic wit and dark humour persist, turning paralysis into a generative force. Optimal anxiety proposes fear as both prison and catalyst – a tension that sharpens the senses, channels dread into productivity and lays the ground for endurance and survival.