Geneviève Claisse

The summer exhibition is dedicated to Geneviève Claisse (1935-2018), a major representative of abstract art in France. Not rejecting her masters but resistant to influences, her journey was totally personal, moving very quickly from the biomorphic forms of the early days to a rigorous and constructed abstraction. It was the legendary Denise René, popess of abstract art, who organized her first Parisian exhibition in 1961. Since then, Geneviève Claisse has repeatedly renewed her discourse sometimes flirting with kineticism, without ever relying on acquired formulas. Confronting and superimposing planes, circles, triangles, squares, parallelograms and dynamic lines that form her grammar, she backs them with frank colors in flat tints that form the syntax of her language

A painter in search of the absolute, helped by a vitalist impulse and a clear creative thought, Geneviève Claisse worked in series with asceticism, purity and rigor, tracing her own path of inner perfection. The one for whom art was the very modality of her existence, imposes herself in the great lineage of female artists to whom constructed art owes so much, such as Barbara Hepworth, Sonia Delaunay or Sophie Taeuber Arp, of whom she is the equal and who should all be put back in the foreground alongside their male acolytes.

Mario Choueiry

Cover image: Geneviève Claisse, Lisbonne, 1961, oil on canvas, and Cercles, 1968, oil on canvas

Image above: Geneviève Claisse, Nucléons, 1975, oil on canvas, and Linéaire, 1979, steel

Photos: Lucie Jean