Martin Barré Les Oeuvres De La Fondation Gandur Pour L'art

Exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, 10 February - 18 September 2023

The practice of Martin Barré (1924-1993) remained in constant mutation throughout the abstract artist's forty-year career. The first canvases painted with brushes and knives were followed in the 1960s by works executed directly with tubes of colour, then with aerosol cans, a technique pioneered by the artist between 1963 and 1967.

This exhibition catalogue presents the fourteen works lent to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen by the Fondation Gandur pour l'art. Painted between 1956 and 1967, these canvases illustrate the decisive decade during which Martin Barré proceeded to a reduction-concentration of pictorial means: deconstruction of the codes of abstract painting then in force to achieve minimalism, a palette limited to a few shades of black and brown, and sparing use of matter.

From this radical period, the study for the proscenium curtain of the main hall of the Maison de la Culture in Grenoble, designed by the architect André Wogenscky, a former collaborator of Le Corbusier, is presented for the first time since 1967.