Claude Viallat
The artist
Claude Viallat was born in 1936 in Nimes, France, where he continues to live and work. He is one of the founders of the Supports/Surfaces movement in the 1970s, which called for art to renew itself through a deconstruction of traditional materials. Viallat started to work on industrial tarp, endlessly repeating the same abstract pattern, resembling a small bone, which became his signature. Stencilled repeatedly onto a range of supports, the pattern asks us to reflect on the meaning of the creative act and the status of the work of art.
Exhibitions
-
Made in Nîmes
March 14 - April 27, 2024
New York -
Homage to Colour — Canvases 1966-2023
November 4 - December 23, 2023
Paris - Beaubourg -
A Couple of Sidesteps
September 7 - November 4, 2023
Brussels -
Sutures et Varia
January 30 – March 20, 2021
Paris - Grenier Saint Lazare -
Les échelles de Nîmes
June 7 - July 27, 2018
Brussels -
Les années 1980
June 4 - July 23, 2016
Paris - Beaubourg -
Claude Viallat
September 12 - October 31, 2014
Brussels -
Oeuvres récentes
March 1 - April 5, 2014
Paris - Beaubourg -
Raboutages
January 10 - February 21, 2009
Paris - Beaubourg -
Tentes militaires
December 1 - January 13, 2007
Paris - Beaubourg -
Portes et fenêtres
January 24 - February 28, 2004
Paris - Beaubourg -
Objets
November 25 - January 13, 2001
Paris - Beaubourg -
Oeuvres récentes
Apr 29 - Jun 3, 1998
Paris - Beaubourg
Biography
| Birth | Born in 1936 in Nîmes, France |
|---|---|
| Residency | He lives and works in Nîmes, France |
| Education | 1955 – 1959, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Montpellier, France 1962 – 1963, Ecole supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France |
SOLO EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)
| 2023 | Homage to colour – Canvases 1966-2023, Templon, Paris, France Claude Viallat, Carré d’Art – musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France A Couple of Sidesteps, Templon, Brussels, Belgium |
|---|---|
| 2022 | Formes en Vrac, Sainte-Marie Chapel, Annonay, France Libertad de Colores, MACBA Buenos Aires, Argentina Claude Viallat, Hôtel Richer de Belleval, Montpellier, France Éclectique, Bonisson Art Center, Rognes, France Claude Viallat, Médiathèque de Vauvert, Vauvert, France Claude Viallat, Maison Elsa Triolet-Aragon, Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, France |
| 2021 | Claude Viallat : Expandend painting in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA Sutures et Varia, Galerie Templon, Paris, France |
| 2019 | Viallat Sérigraphie, Centre Culturel Bérenger de Frédol, Villeneuve-les-Maguelone, France Malereien, Kajetan Gallery, Berlin, Germany Claude Viallat, Venet Foundation, Le Muy, France Re-commencer, La halle des Bouchers, Vienne, France |
| 2018 | Les échelles de Nîmes, Galerie Templon, Brussels, Belgium Claude Viallat, Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière, Luxembourg El Horizonte del Color, Hotel Hilton, Panama City, Panama Art Basel Unlimited, Galerie Daniel Templon, Basel, Switzerland Inside and Outside, HdM Gallery, Beijing, China |
| 2017 | La peinture à perte de vue, Casa França - Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Toiles, Objets, Filets, L'aspirateur, Narbonne, France In situ, Palais des archevêques, Narbonne, France |
| 2016 | Les années 1980, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France Claude Viallat, Hommages à..., Palais Synodal, Sens, France Claude Viallat chez Jean Prouvé, Beauvallon, France |
Voir plus
GROUP EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)
| 2024 | Encore et encore, rituels d’artistes, Maison des Arts de Schaerbeek, Brussels, Belgium |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Amour Systémique, Capc musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France La Répétition, Centre Pompidou-Metz , Metz, France |
| 2022 | VIALLAT/SAYTOUR, Presbytery of Aubais, Aubais, France Collection Collective ACMCM, à cent mètres du centre du monde / Centre d’Art Contemporain, Perpignan, France Tribute to Jacques Girard, Ombres Blanches, Toulouse, France Tauromachies, Mouriès, France |
| 2021 | Supports/Surfaces : Abstractions plurielles 1950-1980, Musée d’art de Pully, Pully, Switzerland Supports/Surfaces : Viallat & Saytour, Musée National d’Art et d’Histoire, Luxembourg, Luxembourg Expanded painting in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA Les murs reculent, Musée Matisse, Nice, France |
| 2019 | East West Jazz - André-Pierre Arnal, Patrick Saytour, Claude Viallat, Musée Pouchkine, Moscou, Russie Mare Nostrum: Identités Méditerranéennes, Espace Monte Cristo, Fondation Villa Datris, Paris, France Histoire de l’art cherche personnage..., CAPC Bordeaux, France Unfurled : Supports/Surfaces 1966-1976, MOCAD, Detroit, Etats-Unis Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d’une femme – Musée d’art contemporain, Saint-Etienne, France Un autre œil d’Apollinaire à aujourd’hui, LAAC Dunkerque, France Gigantisme – Art et Industrie, FRAC Grand Large Hauts-de-France, Dunkerque, France Supports/Surfaces, Tsinghua Art Museum, Pékin, China Pattern, décoration et crime, Le Consortium, Dijon, France La composante Peintures, FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France |
| 2018 | Images en lutte, Beaux-Arts, Paris, France School of Nice from Pop Art to happenings, City Hall, Hong Kong, China La Méditerranée et l'art moderne, Musée Mohammed VI, Rabat, Maroc Nous aussi nous aimons l'art, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France |
| 2017 | École(s) de Nice 1947 - 1967, MAMAC, Nice, France The Surface of the East coast, Le 109, Nice, France Supports/Surfaces, les origines 1966-1970, Carré d'Art, Nîmes, France |
Voir plus
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS (SELECTION)
| Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France | |
| Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France | |
| Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, France | |
| Carré d'Art, Musée d'Art Moderne de Nîmes, France | |
| Musée Cantini, Marseille, France | |
| Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nice, France | |
| Musée d'Art Moderne de Strasbourg, France |
Voir plus
Press
The New York Times - April, 2024
What to See in N.Y.C galleries in April
Blake Gopnik - Roberta Smith - Max Lakin
Radio France - December, 2023
Claude Viallat, peintre : "Je ponctue l'espace, je marque un tempo"
La Libre Belgique - September, 2023
Les surfaces souveraines de Claude Viallat
Gwennaëlle Gribaumont
Télérama Sortir - mars 2021
Claude Viallat - Sutures et varia
Le Figaro - March, 2023
Un week-end haut en couleur avec Mika, Gainsbourg et Viallat...
Sophie De Santis
Art Media Agency - juin 2016
Claude Viallat essence et négation
Connaissance des Arts - juin 2016
Claude Viallat, l'euphorie des années 1980
News
Claude Viallat
GROUP SHOW — ENCORE ET ENCORE. RITUELS D’ARTISTES
La Maison des Arts, Brussels
From February 23 to May 5, 2024
For the group show Encore et Encore. Rituels d’artistes, Claude Viallat is exhibiting three works from February 23, 2024 at La Maison des Arts in Brussels. Ritual is understood here not in the religious sense, even if a metaphysical dimension may be associated with it, but in the repetition of actions invested with a particular meaning and inscribed in time.
Claude Viallat
GROUP SHOW — ET POURTANT SI…
Carré d’Art, Nîmes
From October 27, 2023 to February 11, 2024
The Carré d’Art in Nîmes is dedicating a solo show to Claude Viallat, Et pourtant si…, curated by Matthieu Leglise. This wide-ranging exhibition offers a glimpse of a ten-year period in the expansion of a practice that never ceases to extend its play of colour into unexpected forms.
Claude Viallat
SOLO SHOW – FORMES EN VRAC
Chapelle Sainte-Marie-Claude, Annonay
Through August 19, 2022
Provocative and sumptuous, rigorous and ironic, Claude Viallat’s painting shows the power of color through the repetition of a simple form. At La Chapelle, the artist display a selection of recent, unstructured canvases that respond to the architecture of the place by the audacity of their form and the flamboyance of the color.
Claude Viallat
SOLO SHOW – LIBERTAD DE COLORES
Claude Viallat - Libertad de Colores
MACBA, Buenos Aires
From March 4 to June 12, 2022
This exhibition brings together the most representative works of his oeuvre, which, grouped by theme, pay homage to one of the most important contemporary colourists, whose abstract pictorial syntax is constantly being renewed while still identifiable among all the others through its serial imprints, its materiality, the nature of its support, its manufacture, the surface treatment and its presentation. A prolific and demanding artist, Claude Viallat, who was one of the founders of the Supports-Surfaces movement created in 1970, has been creating for more than 60 years a universe that explodes with colours, leaving traces of his universal poetry in space and time.
Claude Viallat
SOLO SHOW – ECLECTIQUE
Claude Viallat - Eclectique
Bonisson Art Center, Aix-en-Provence
From February 26 to June 12, 2022
Claude Viallat’s work is based on the conviction that “the object of painting is painting itself”, in a movement of repetition and overcoming: “The notion of repetition, of series or repetitions, becomes a de facto necessity”. The absence of subject matter allows him to concentrate on forms and structures, on the relationship between colours, on pictorial matter, generating a unique work on colour.
Claude Viallat
SOLO SHOW – KITCHISSIME
Claude Viallat - Kitchissime
Fondation GGL Helenis, Montpellier
Through May 30, 2022
The exhibition sheds light on a selection of recent works, objects made of rope with a vernacular rusticity, but also on fabrics painted with repeated motif, which became his signature. An always-renewed shape while the artist plays on the diversity of the materials and appropriates the raw support for a sound and rhythmic colourism transcending the simplicity of the motif.
Claude Viallat
EXPANDED PAINTING IN THE 1960S AND 1970S – GROUP SHOW
Fall 2021
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia
The exhibition “Expanded Painting in the 1960s and 1970s” presents radical innovations in painting that testify to a pursuit of freedom and expression in the midst of a period marked by social and political unrest in the United States and abroad. From Alma Thomas’s mosaic-like painting of flowers to Sam Gilliam’s suspended, draped canvas, these works speak to an upending of barriers-be they artistic, ideological, racial, or rooted in gender stereotypes. By rethinking and systematically probing conventions associated with the painted canvas, these works ultimately speak to the desire for a deeper, more fundamental connection to nature, the body, movement, and light.
Claude Viallat
SUPPORTS/SURFACES : VIALLAT & SAYTOUR – GROUP SHOW
Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art
Marché-aux-Poissons L-2345 Luxembourg
Until August 29, 2021
In this exhibition important acquisitions from recent years are shown, focusing on works by two founding members of the Supports/Surfaces movement: Patrick Saytour and Claude Viallat. As a representative of the Nouvelle Peinture, Claude Viallat focuses on the primary and structural elements of painting: the canvas, the colour and the surface. Since 1966, he has been working on colour, which is both the subject and the object. The stretcher disappears. The free canvas is painted and against this background of colour, Viallat places stencil prints, repeatedly and in series. Most of the works presented here show that for him color is elementary to convey the repeated forms that lend his art coherent dimensions and rhythm, so characteristic of Supports/Surfaces.
