GEORGES MATHIEU: 1960-1970
Perrotin is pleased to present the first exhibition of Georges Mathieu (1921-2012). The artist is considered a leading figure in lyrical abstraction, the post-war European art movement which emphasized improvisational and spontaneous expression.
July 12 - August 24, 2024
Through his boldness and his rejection of conformity, Georges Mathieu stands out as a key figure of abstract painting, which he passionately defended throughout the twentieth century. Combining spontaneous gestures with a dramatic dimension, the artist devoted his life to an endless quest for total freedom.
Instead of an optimistic and utopian celebration of a developing future, these artists individually expressed a disenchanted attitude toward their time in response to the atrocities of World War II. This rejection of the external world paved the way for a new creative direction turned toward introspection and the exploration of interiority. And Georges Mathieu occupies a special place within it.
Drawing on Surrealism and its discoveries about automatic creative processes and the psyche, Georges Mathieu transformed his art into an outlet for the perceptible expressions of his interiority. The fundamental tensions of the human mind, alternating between creative jubilation and self-destructive violence, are transcribed onto his canvases through an artistic vocabulary of joyous splashes, blood-like drips, and volcanic projections.
Georges Mathieu’s first piece of writing on art, titled, La Liberté, c’est le vide (Liberty is the Void) was published in the catalogue for the exhibition H.W.P.S.M.T.B. at Galerie Colette Allendy in 1948. In this text, the artist established the foundation of Lyrical Abstraction as a “phenomenology of the act of painting.” Throughout his life, he defended the idea of art as a signifier, which, at the moment of its creation, must precede the signified.
While maintaining his allegiance to the premises of Lyrical Abstraction, Mathieu’s painting evolved over the decades toward new stylistic experiments marked by greater serenity, and he also began to include the applied arts in his work. During a lecture in 1980, the artist stated: “As for me, in very general terms, my development has taken me from a cry to an aesthetic.”
As shown by the painting Innocent III (1960), an explicit reference to an eminent medieval pope, this phase of artistic maturity is marked by a growing spirituality. Mathieu’s evolution tends toward syncretic pantheism, culminating in what we might call the “cosmic turn” in his work that culminates in the 1980s.