Fabienne Verdier

Born in Paris in 1962, Fabienne Verdier is a contemporary artist whose monumental abstract paintings unite the discipline of Chinese calligraphy with the gestural energy of Western abstraction. Through sweeping lines, concentrated colour and dynamic brushwork, she explores movement and the force of nature.

After graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse in 1983, she received a postgraduate scholarship to study at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China. There, she spent nearly a decade studying calligraphy under some of the last traditional Chinese painters who survived the Cultural Revolution. Her memoir, Passagère du silence (2003), recounts these formative years.

Returning to Europe in the early 1990s, Verdier developed a distinctive painting method centred on physical gesture. Using giant, suspended brushes of her own design, she harnesses gravity and the movement of her body to create expansive marks across large canvases. Her paintings evoke rhythms of natural phenomena, from the flow of water and the movement of wind to geological forces.

Between 2009 and 2013, she turned her attention to Early Netherlandish painting. She created paintings in dialogue with the works of Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and Rogier van der Weyden as a way to explore the relationship between historical painting traditions and contemporary abstraction. During her artist residency at The Juilliard School in New York in 2014, she began experimenting with the synchronicity between sound and painting. In 2017, she subsequently collaborated with lexicographer Alain Rey on 22 paintings for the 50th-anniversary edition of the Petit Robert dictionary. In 2019, the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence presented a major retrospective of her work. Her paintings are held in collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Pinault Collection.

Continuing to develop her practice, the artist has exhibited internationally, with Ascèse (2006) achieving €403,200 at Christie’s Paris in June 2023, setting an auction record for the artist.