Fabienne Verdier
b. 1962, France
Fabienne Verdier (b.1962, Paris) is a French abstract painter who explores the dynamism of natural forces, combining the aesthetics of Western art (line, action and expression) with aspects of traditional Eastern art (unity, spontaneity and asceticism). Verdier paints vertically with giant brushes and tools of her own invention, suspended from the studio ceiling and hanging directly over the canvas. As a young art school graduate of l’École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, in 1984 Verdier was awarded a postgraduate scholarship at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in China. She left France to study calligraphy there with some of the last great Chinese painters who had survived the Cultural Revolution. This cultural immersion as an apprentice painter would last nearly a decade (1984–1993), as recounted in her 2005 autobiography, Passagère du Silence: Dix ans d'initiation en Chine.
Verdier’s work has been exhibited extensively both in Europe and internationally, including in Beijing, Brussels, Lausanne, London, Paris, Rome, Singapore, Taipei and Zurich. In 2011, she was included in the exhibition ‘The Art of Deceleration: from Caspar David Friedrich to Ai Wei Wei’, at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, and collaborated with architect Jean Nouvel on his designs for the National Art Museum of China project in Beijing. The Hubert Looser Foundation in Zurich, having previously commissioned several works, presented Verdier’s painting in an exhibition at Vienna’s Kunstforum in 2012 alongside work by Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly. In 2013, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, Belgium presented Verdier’s work in conversation with Flemish Primitives such as Van Eyck and Memling. In 2014, Verdier created an installation of seven works for Köningsklasse II, organised by the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and participated in the group show Formes Simples at Centre Pompidou-Metz, Paris. The same year, Verdier spent time as artist-in-residence at The Juilliard School, New York where she studied the breathing techniques employed by the sopranos studying there and painted responses to Mozart’s arias. Verdier was invited to compose a visual partita for the 2017 edition of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and won the commission to design the official poster for the Roland-Garros French Open. In 2018, she set up a nomadic studio on Montagne Sainte-Victoire, a landscape renowned for its presence in over 30 paintings by Paul Cézanne. The series was exhibited alongside the works of Cézanne at Verdier’s celebrated retrospective exhibition at Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, 2019. In 2022 Verdier had a solo show at the Musée Camille Claudel, Alchimie d'un vitrail, which showcased a series of stained-windows she created alongside ‘master glassmaker’ Flavie Serrière Vincent-Petit. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Le Chant des Étoiles, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France (2022); Im Auge des Kosmos, Saarlandmuseum-Moderne Galerie, Saarbruck, Germany (2022); La Mouvance de la Matière, at the Château Lynch-Bages, Pauillac, France (2023); and Retables, Waddington Custot, London (2024). Verdier’s work features in a number of important collections, including the MNAM Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Musée Granet (Aix-en-Provence) the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Munich) and the Fondation Hubert Looser and the
Kunsthaus in Zurich. In 2016, seven of Verdier’s works were acquired by Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and as of 2023 she has been commissioned to create two frescos for the platforms of the new Brussels metro Toots Thielman stations.
Fabienne Verdier lives and works in France.