Fabienne Verdier : Retables

Exhibition at the Galerie Lelong, Paris, 12 September - 31 October 2024,
and at the Waddington-Custot Gallery, London, 11 October - 9 November 2024

In 2022, French artist Fabienne Verdier (1962-) presented a major exhibition at Colmar's Musée Unterlinden, based entirely on the luminous halo surrounding the body of Christ on a panel of the Issenheim Altarpiece, Mathias Grünewald's masterpiece and the museum's treasure trove.

Was it the artist's long association with this altarpiece that led him to adopt this form? A central panel flanked by two smaller, movable panels. In any case, the effect is striking, as it reinforces the presence and intensity of the signs that the artist traces on these panels. Fabienne Verdier's skilful use of colour contrasts on these panels distils a kind of personal anthology of her favourite gestures.

This exhibition catalogue presents this new series of works by Fabienne Verdier, in which she breaks with the conventional format of the canvas and adopts the structure of a winged altarpiece, reimagining it outside a religious context. No longer linked to a liturgical function, these works use individual abstract motifs, painted with the large brushes emblematic of Fabienne Verdier's art, to evoke individual phenomena from the natural world.