Fabienne Verdier: Retables

Retables, a solo exhibition of work by Paris-born artist, Fabienne Verdier, brings together sixteen altarpieces (retables, in French), along with five large-format walking paintings and a series of new silkscreens. The exhibition takes over two of the gallery’s spaces, at rue de Téhéran and avenue Matignon.

Retables, in part, stems from a major exhibition Verdier presented at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, in 2022, which was based on the luminous halo that surrounds the body of Christ painted on the Isenheim Altarpiece by Mathias Grünewald, a masterpiece that is found in this museum in Northern France. Verdier has long integrated elements of the divine and spiritual into her work, notably through light and colour, which she works to evoke in her stained-glass paintings. Small chapels and museums have been a source of inspiration to the artist, these intimate spaces of contemplation and beauty. For Retables, the artist features a series of acrylic and mixed media on canvas paintings, several of which are shaped like an altarpiece, in three-sections, opening slightly outwards on the sides. The exhibition is underlined by the artist’s interest in the sublime, here rendered through her abstract expressionist gestures and the movement of paint across the canvas.

As Lise Coirier wrote in a 2022 article for TLmag Online, “’Capturing the mutation of light in all its variations of light, script and dance in the space’, is how artist Fabienne Verdier defines her gestures, taking shape in her movements and her artistic practice, which is oriented towards the Chinese culture of calligraphy and the painting of both East and West.”

A 256-page catalogue, titled Retables, will be produced on the occasion of this exhibition and will feature a text by Stéphane Lambert.

Retables is on view from September 12-October 31, 2024.

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