Georges Mathieu — le site officiel
Founder of Lyrical Abstraction, inventor of performance art, pioneer of Action Painting, speed and risk, dripping, early inspirer of street art
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![𝗦𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗙𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗻𝘃𝗮𝘀: 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗲𝘂
Great review by @DavidEbony in @ArtInAmerica / @ArtNews
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“A precursor to Happenings and performance art, and an intriguing example of asemic writing—which resembles language but does not carry meaning—the work of French painter Georges Mathieu (1921–2012) was both influential and prescient. Yet Mathieu’s achievements have largely faded from view, at least within the United States. This remarkable New York survey, featuring some thirty-six major works filling two venues [@galerieperrotin & @nahmadcontemporary], marks the artist’s centenary. […]
Mathieu often titled his works after medieval or pre–French Revolution battles, as with The Victory of Denain (1963), one of several stunning examples at Perrotin. Here, against a hazy, stained, coffee-hued background—modulated from deep umber on the lower right to muted beige on the upper left—thick, slashing brushstrokes of red, white, and blue thrust from left to right, traversing the central portion of the twenty-three-foot-wide canvas. In palette and composition, the work recalls Jean Alaux’s 1839 painting of the same subject, which depicts a 1712 French victory in the War of the Spanish Succession. In Mathieu’s painting, and in many of his other epic-scale compositions, he abstracts and critiques the tradition of grandiose history painting. The intensity of Mathieu’s gestures, and the resultant complex, layered cursive, also evokes wildstyle graffiti and certain works that Futura and Rammellzee produced in the 1980s. […]
In a stark composition like First Avenue (1957, at Perrotin), featuring only a few convulsive splashes and drips of white tossed at the center of a pitch-black background, with several poignant red slashing lines at upper right, Mathieu directly responds to the New York School of Pollock and Franz Kline, as a representative of Paris’s own brand of testosterone-driven, postwar angst.”
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#GeorgesMathieu #LyricalAbstraction](https://georges-mathieu.fr/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)
