Fabienne Verdier achieves new auction record at Christie's

Her 2006 diptyque 'Ascèse' sells for over double the high estimate

Fabienne Verdier, a French abstract painter who explores the forces in nature through techniques and traditions of both Western and Eastern art, has set a new auction record at the Christie’s Paris contemporary art evening sale on 7 June. Her 2006 diptyque 'Ascèse' sold for €403,200 ($434,838), slightly more than double the high estimate.

Verdier paints vertically in ink, standing directly on her stretchers with giant brushes and tools of her invention suspended from her studio ceiling. Verdier’s work combines Eastern aspects of unity, spontaneity and asceticism with the line, action and expression of Western painting.

As a young art school graduate from l'École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, Verdier was awarded in 1984 a postgraduate scholarship at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in China, and left France to study the art of calligraphy and other Eastern traditions with some of the last great Chinese painters who survived the Cultural Revolution. Her adventure and immersion as an apprentice painter would last nearly a decade, over the years 1984–1993, recounted in her 2005 book, Passagère du Silence: Dix ans d'initiation en Chine.