Question de Peinture — Des années 40 à nos jours — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 13 → April 30, 2016

The exhibition About Painting presents painters that the gallery has shown from the 1940s to today. It certainly is a question of painting and a question of the painters that have been with the gallery, since all the exhibited works date from the first exhibitions of these artists at the gallery

Works of naïve artist André Bauchant (1927*), self-taught painter who was close with Le Corbusier and considered as one of the five French naïve painters; the abstract painting of André Lanskoy (1942*) whom Jeanne Bucher would vehemently defend in spite of the German censorship against abstraction, which was considered “Degenerate Art” in the 1940s; it is moreover at the gallery that André Lanskoy met the young Nicolas de Staël in 1944, when Jeanne Bucher exhibited his work for the first time. Then came the great 1950s abstract artists of the Paris School, Maria-Helena Vieira Da Silva (1933*), Arpad Szenes (1933*), Mark Tobey (1945*), Bissière (1951*), Jean Dubuffet (1964*) and Asger Jorn (1967*), who rubbed shoulders frequently at the gallery and animated the artistic life of an effervescent Montparnasse and St-Germain-des-Prés

Several very young, foreign-born abstract artists living in Paris were exhibited for the first time at the gallery in the 1950s and then continually afterward, for example the Spanish Fermin Aguayo (1955*), the Algerian Louis Nallard (1951*), and the Swiss Wilfrid Moser (1952*), who brought their New Abstraction; then came the return to figuration with ANTONIO SEGUI (1964*), who had recently arrived from Argentina; the Montenegrin painter Dado (1971*) who had just arrived in Paris and whose quality of painting fascinated Dubuffet; the Irish painter Louis Le Brocquy (1979*); as well as the talented young French painter Gérard Fromanger (1973*), leading figure in the Figurative Narration movement, whose Centre Pompidou exhibition will open only a few days after the opening of Question de Peinture. Putting himself in the lineage of the great tradition of Courbet’s realist painting, Paul Rebeyrolle (1999*) exhibited his large canvases at the gallery at the beginning of the 2000s.

Vue de l’exposition Question de peinture Photo © Hervé Abbadie

These established painters were joined at the gallery by Yang Jiechang (1989*), invited to France in 1989 for the large exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at Beaubourg with his works 100 couches d’encre (100 Layers of Ink). The rejuvenation of the direction of the gallery in 2003, within a familial continuity, saw the arrival of such contemporary artists as Mickael Biberstein (2006*), who passed away prematurely two years ago, and on behalf of whom the gallery has worked incessantly to pursue the painting of the ceiling of the Santa Isabel Church in Lisbon, which should be finished in May 2016. The gallery was also joined by the French painter Fabienne Verdier (2008*), whose calligraphic gesture creates an Abstraction based on the Real, with an oeuvre featuring giant paintbrush strokes at the Tour Majunga at la Défense; Miguel Branco (2012*), whose work, at once traditional and very contemporary, will be shown at the Musée de la Chasse in October 2016; and Evi Keller (2015*), whose Matière-Lumières, playing with a constant movement of forms and transparent colors, open a previously unseen field of exploration for painting, becoming at once veil, sculpture, screen, and vessel. Keller’s audiovisual work [TOWARD-THE-LIGHT — silent transformations] will be presented from March to August 2016 at the CENTRALE for contemporary art (Brussels) in the exhibition Connected.

Date of the artist’s arrival at the gallery *