Fabienne Verdier

Critical acclaim for Fabienne Verdier: Sur les terres de Cézanne

 'One of the most extraordinary French painters of today…This retrospective at the Granet Museum is magnificent'.
Le Point

'Fabienne Verdier's rendering of the Sainte-Victoire landscape has pushed forward the artistic language of landscape once again…. captured in a single trait, these abstract works evoke their surroundings not through literal representation but through the patterns of energy they express.'
Wallpaper*

'The originality of the approach of this major artist of contemporary art lies in the constant dialogue she has with other artists, thinkers or scientists.'
France Inter

Musée Granet | Cité du Livre | Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme

From 21 June - 13 October 2019, three leading cultural institutions in Aix-en-Provence - the Musée Granet, the Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme and the Cité du livre, Galerie Zola - will explore various aspects of Fabienne Verdier's work together with her most recent large scale paintings, inspired by working within the landscape immortalised by Cézanne.

Musée Granet

At the Musée Granet, a vast 700-square-meter exhibition (21 June - 13 October 2019) retraces Fabienne Verdier's journey, from her return to France from China, where she lived for over a decade, to works created in recent months in the quarries of Bibémus, opposite Sainte-Victoire, at the top of the legendary mountain, in Saint-Antonin and nearby. This is the artist's first retrospective in France.

This exhibition will allow visitors to appreciate the artist's work in its entirety, to better understand the lessons she learned from Chinese scholars as one of the first international visitors to China following the Cultural Revolution and to see how, following her return to France, Verdier developed a new aesthetic by drawing on major intellectual currents in Western painting, from Flemish Primitives to the Abstract Expressionists. The museum's rooms explore six major themes to provide an overview of the artist's work, its evolution, depth and variety.

Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme

The Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme will present Verdier's working techniques (21 June - 13 October 2019). In this unusual 18th-century space dedicated to contemporary art, set in a garden in the heart of the city, visitors can admire the artist's "nomadic workshop", which enabled her to work outside in nature. Items include brushes made by the artist, and an entire room devoted to drawings and gouaches made on top of Sainte-Victoire mountain. The film Walking Painting, on view in the exhibition, provides a better understanding of the complexity of the artist's creative process. Echoing this, on the first floor, a "storyboard" reveals the different phases of work that led to her most recent creations inspired by places familiar to Cézanne on show concurrently at the Musée Granet.

Cité du Livre - Galerie Zola

From 21 June to 14 September, the Cité du livre - Galerie Zola presents 4 quartets, 4 films - a fully immersive video installation. This cinematographic work was produced during a residency in the summer of 2017 at the invitation of the Academy of the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival.

In the Chapel of the Visitation in the heart of the city, Fabienne Verdier studied with four of the most talented young quartets of their generation, to discover how the writing of each musical work might reveal, through her brush, voids and forms that would make these works heard in a new way, as the artist explains: "This work is a visual and sound journey that allows the spectator to feel music and painting at the rhythm and tempo of their imagination".

Another exhibition to explore:

Prieuré de Sainte-Victoire

A further exhibition is being held at the same time in the chapel of the Prieuré de Sainte- Victoire, restored in 2018 by the Friends of Sainte-Victoire. Some twenty drawings by Fabienne Verdier produced on the site in October 2018 are on display, alongside Philippe Chancel's photographs showing the artist at work on Sainte-Victoire and in the priory.