Michel Parmentier — 15 février 1984 — 12 août 1985 — Loevenbruck Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 2 → March 16, 2024

Loevenbruck is pleased to program the fourth exhibition of Michel Parmentier’s work since announcing the representation of the Estate in 2014. Featuring works produced between 1983 and 1985, the exhibition Michel Parmentier: February 15, 1984 — August 12, 1985 presents four works from the series of black paintings.

In 1983, after a fifteen-year hiatus, Parmentier resumed painting: “In short, I definitively ceased painting. Which means very exactly that I can commit another offense [récidiver] when I want, and without having to account for it.”¹ He now made canvases with horizontal black and white bands [which he exhibits in 1984 at the Galerie Liliane & Michel Durand-Dessert].² Whereas in 1966, 1967, and 1968 each year brought a change of color, this time the black was maintained for two years in succession.³

Vue de l’exposition Michel Parmentier — 15 février 1984 — 12 août 1985, galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, 2024 © ADAGP, Paris. AMP–Michel Parmentier Archives, Bruxelles. The Estate of Michel Parmentier. Photo Fabrice Gousset, courtesy Loevenbruck, Paris.

Having created just over 70 paintings throughout his career, Michel Parmentier (1938–2000) was nevertheless an active and influential figure within the postwar critique on traditional modes of art-making. Grounding his practice on a denial of gesture and narrative, he is best known for the highly standardized, horizontallystriped canvases that he painted between 1965 and 1968. These works, produced through the pliage technique of folding the ground before the pigment is applied, are comprised of perfectly even, 38-centimeter bands which Parmentier varied in color annually (blue in 1966, gray in 1967, red in 1968 and black after 1983).

In January 1967, Parmentier formalized his attack on painterly subjectivity when he co-founded the group BMPT with Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset and Niele Toroni.

Fusing minimalism and institutional critique, BMPT interrogated what they collectively considered to be bourgeois artistic sensibility in a series of four paintingperformance ‘manifestations’. Parmentier broke from BMPT in December 1967 and, in August 1968, from painting altogether. His practice remained dormant until January 1983, when he resumed with a series of black paintings.

Vue de l’exposition Michel Parmentier — 15 février 1984 — 12 août 1985, galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, 2024 © ADAGP, Paris. AMP–Michel Parmentier Archives, Bruxelles. The Estate of Michel Parmentier. Photo Fabrice Gousset, courtesy Loevenbruck, Paris.

By the mid-1980s, Parmentier had turned his focus to large-scale, freehand work on paper. Utilizing graphite, charcoal, pastel and oil stick, this body of work broadened his practice while remaining committed to the same motivations that had fueled his career in the 1960s.⁴ Michel Parmentier studied at the École des Métiers d’Art and both lived and worked in Paris, France. He is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes; Musée des BeauxArts de Nantes; Fondation La Caixa, Spain; and the François Pinault Collection, Paris.

¹ Extract from the text-article by Michel Parmentier, “B.M.T. Moi et les autres” (B.M.T., Me and the Others), January 1967/January 1981, Artistes : revue bimestrielle d’art contemporain, no. 11, June-July 1982.

² Exhibition “Parmentier 1983-1984,” Galerie Liliane & Michel Durand-Dessert, Paris, September 15 — October 9, 1984.

³ Guy Massaux, “[black] January 25, 1983 — August 12, 1985”, in Michel Parmentier, December 1965 — November 20, 1999: A Retrospective, Paris, éditions Loevenbruck, 2016, p. 119.

⁴ Extract from the press release of the exhibition “Michel Parmentier: Paintings & Works on Paper”, Ortuzar Projects New York, February 16 — April 7, 2018.