Background

Fabienne Verdier was born in 1962 in Paris, France to an artist father. She has four brothers and sisters.

Education

Fabienne Verdier was taught the classical easel painting by her father who was an artist.

She received a diploma from École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse (School of Fine Arts, Toulouse) in 1983. A year later, she obtained a scholarship that allowed her to do post-graduate studies at the Chinese Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.

Verdier studied painting, aesthetics, and philosophy there till 1993. Simultaneously, she took lessons of spontaneous painting from the last great Chinese painting masters.

Career

The start of Fabienne Verdier’s career can be counted from 1992 when she came back to France from China. Ten years later, she wrote a book about the time she had spent there, ‘Passagère du Silence’.

One of the first solo exhibitions of the artist took place in 2005 at Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne, Switzerland. After the show, she received a commission from the Hubert Looser Foundation to create a series of works similar in style to the art of such Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists as John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, and Cy Twombly in its private collection. Verdier’s works from the series have been shown since then in the different art venues in France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The next period of Verdier’s process of artistic creation was related to the art of the Flemish painting of the 15th century. Fabienne’s inspiration by the power of their color palette and the apparent immobility of their canvases, especially in the certain works of Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, and Simon Marmion, resulted in a series of sketches and paintings.

In 2010, the artist tried her hand in frescos for the first time creating a monumental piece of work to decorate one of the rooms in the familial palace of the Torlonia family in Rome. The paintings made in the new ‘walking’ technique elaborated by the artist were first demonstrated to the public in Singapore at Art Plural Gallery. Verdier’s involvement in the architecture continued by the 2013 collaboration with architect Jean Nouvel with whom she worked on the design concept for the museum of modern art in Pekin, the National Museum of China.

The year 2014 was rich in artistic projects for Fabienne Verdier. First, she responded to the call of the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and contributed her work, Mélodie du reel, to support the installation of seven pieces by other contemporary artists from Germany and the United States. The work was acquired by the permanent collection of the Herrenchiemsee Palace. To celebrate the thirty anniversary of Verdier’s artistic career, the city of Hong Kong organized a retrospective of about thirty-five of her paintings and drawings at Hong Kong City Hall with the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Finally, that same year, Fabienne Verdier executed a huge painting of thirty meters of height to decorate the entrance of the new Tour Majunga at La Défense in Puteaux, not far from Paris. In 2014, she spent several months at the Juilliard School, New York City where she collaborated with Darrett Adkins, Kenny Barron, William Christie, Philip Lasser, and Edith Wiens.

The further artistic investigations of Fabienne Verdier led her to discover the similarities between pictorial forms and sonic lines. In 2017, at the invitation of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, the artist established an experimental studio/laboratory that united painting and music. In the second part of the year, Verdier was invited by Le Petit Robert dictionary to celebrate its 50th-anniversary edition by helping a lexicographer Alain Rey visualize the creative process of the French language. Within three years, Verdier created twenty-two abstract works to illustrate the word pairs selected for the project.

In 2018, Fabienne Verdier designed the poster for the internationally known tennis tournament Roland-Garros.

The most recent retrospective of Fabienne Verdier was held at the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence from June to October of 2019. Consisting of five sections, the show featured different periods of Verdier’s artistic path, from the early Chinese years of formation as an artist to the late works around the Sainte-Victoire mountain.

During the course of her career, Verdier has shown her art nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Europe and Asia. Her art in Paris and New York City is represented by Lelong Gallery since the summer of 2017.

Achievements

• 

  Fabienne Verdier is an accomplished artist who has masterly managed to reflect the momentariness, the resilience, and the constant changeability of nature and life on her canvases made by bold gestural brushstrokes.
  
  Inspired by the vertical act of painting that she discovered in China, Verdier had an idea to apply the giant suspended brush to the technique. By doing so, she united two cultures and elaborated a new approach to the spontaneous abstract painting.
  
  Verdier’s artwork was acquired by the Centre Pompidou in 2007 for the first time. Her pieces of art can be also seen at such venues as Musée Cernuschi, Paris, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, the Foundation Hubert Looser, Zurich, the Chinese Ministry of Culture, and the Honda Group, Tokyo among others.
  
  The number of sold copies of Verdier’s book about her early experience in China, ‘Passagère du Silence’ reached 230,000. The volume was marked by several prizes and translated into six languages.
  
  In 2019, ‘Méandres II’ by Fabienne Verdier was purchased for $168,467 at Christie's in Paris.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Passagère du Silence

    (The English and French Edition of the book that contains ...)

    2003

• drawing

  • Memories of Norway n° 26

  • Fenêtre sur l’infini n° 2

  • Voix Breath Column

  • Sur le chemin des crêtes, Sainte-Victoire, étude n°13

• painting

  • Géographie Fugitive

  • A deux

  • Au gré du vent

  • Épouser la pureté d'un lotus

  • Bois de merisier

  • Maturare n° 27

  • Reflets de l'eau n° 7

  • Fugue de Bach

  • Méditations en cobalt

  • "Curiosa varietas", Variété curieuse

  • Cercle blanc I

  • Ligne espace-temps n° 1

  • Méandre, la pensée labyrinthique

  • Polyphonie

  • Paysage d'hiver II

  • Walking painting/Rouge

  • Table d’harmonie

  • Sinuosité - Sagesse I

  • Montagne Sainte-Victoire, depuis le barrage de Bimont

Views

Quotations: "My history and background is very special; I am an intrepid woman, a bit of a rebel maybe, in the face of institutions and school and, well, everything. Being a painter means attending a school of free thinking, a form of resistance to today’s world, organised and managed by means that defy our understanding – by algorithms, equations and artificial intelligence."

"I love it when people view my work without knowing anything about me."

Connections

Fabienne Verdier married a business consultant Ghislain in 1992.

colleague:

Jean Nouvel

colleague:

Alain Rey

References

• Fabienne Verdier Official Website