photo: TOYONAGA Seiji

Gris, from series Les Éclats

ArtistMonique FRYDMAN
Year2004
Material/ Techniquepigment, pastel and binder on linen
Size/ DurationH250 × W250cm
Copyright Notice© Monique FRYDMAN
Year of acquisition/ donation2012(作品購入年月日:2012/03/16)
DescriptionBorn in Nages, France in 1943. Lives and works in Paris and Senantes.

Monique Frydman, who is recognized as one of France’s foremost women artists, became a practicing artist in the late 1970s. Focusing on painting as her primary medium, she explores color and light using such materials as canvas, pigments, pastels, cord, and paper. Her colors and images, emergent from an intimate, bilateral dialogue between her materials and own body, manifest fragments of memory and relics from her distant past – sometimes without her realizing it, and stir our own emotions and memory. In recent years, she has also undertaken site-specific installations using glass, plexiglass, paper, and cloth.

The three paintings "Or" (Gold), "Gris" (Grey) and "Amarante" (Amaranth) from Frydman’s “Les Eclats” series are each named after their compositional color. In each painting, we see a mist of pale color, shining as it spreads, and within the mist, countless patterns of fine lines moving in all directions. The lines are imprints created by rubbing pastel blocks over a dampened canvas laid on top of randomly arranged bits of cord and twigs. Frydman cannot see these objects, below the fabric, but only feel their material qualities. It is, therefore, her hand that she trusts to read and capture them. To express her image, she never controls her materials but rather listens to their voice, confirming their qualities through close contact. Within her deep physical connection with them, she awakens a circuit connecting with basic human perceptions and emotions. Frydman, while carrying on a line of modern painting that begins with Henri MATISSE and Pierre BONNARD and extends to abstract expressionism and color field painting, confronts her own identity as a woman and her physical and personal memory, sublimating these in artworks that demonstrate the fundamental power and profound spirituality of the painting medium.

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