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You find an extract from the Exhibition Catalogue below.
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| Exhibition Catalogue in German and English: € 21,80 |
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Dr. Barbara Willert: Balance of Colours and Forms
Geneviève Claisse is one of the foremost representatives of Geometrical Abstraction in France. Over the last 50 years she has established a body of work that is as wide-ranging as it is impressive, and that captivates with its extremely subtle balance of colours and forms. After initially creating tight compositions steeped in colour, over the years she has arrived at an increasingly purist aesthetic. Geneviève Claisse, who apart from paintings also makes sculptures and reliefs, soon developed her own unmistakable style. Unlike many artists in the field of abstraction, who often begin with figurative styles, right from the outset she pursued an autonomous, non-representational language free of any reference to the world of things.
Growing up in the small village of Quiévy in northern France, far from the Parisian metropolis which sets the tone in art matters, she created quite spontaneously and intuitively her first abstracts while still a teenager. The intellectual roots of her art lie
in the early geometrical constructivist movements, above all in Kasimir Malevich’s ideology of non-objective art, Suprematism. In addition, her fellow countryman Auguste Herbin assumed a key role in the young artist’s development. A chance meeting in 1954 ended up in a master-pupil relationship between the two, which lasted until Herbin’s death in 1960. Auguste Herbin, co-founder of the artists group Abstraction-Création, served as a critical authority for Geneviève Claisse, which gave her own artistic career a number of fruitful impulses. Yet she never adopted his theory of the »alphabet plastique«, which he developed in 1942, and which consisted of a kind of painted language produced by coding the letters of the alphabet according to colour values and geometrical forms. A systematic code like this would have paralysed and placed a corset on her fanciful, intuitively abstract visual language, which from its inception was totally autonomous and free of any link to the objective world.
It is this very freedom from the rulebooks and the dominance of painterly subjectivity that distinguishes Geneviève Claisse’s paintings. Already the earliest gouaches and sketchbooks we have of hers from the 1950s reveal an artist who was about to set out on a very independent path. The exceptional facility she already demonstrates on these pages is truly remarkable. (Fig. 1+2) They still often feature amorphous and seemingly organic constellations of shapes in fresh, powerful colours, whose luminosity is not infrequently heightened by a dark black background. These works on paper show that the instinctive feeling for chords of colour and shapes that is so characteristic of Geneviève Claisse’s work was already fully developed by then.
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