Almine Rech is pleased to announce Claire Tabouret Portraits, the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery.
The bodies painted by Claire Tabouret open up a space for the viewer's sensitivity. The artist's previous series of works shown at Almine Rech Paris showcased the theme of the couple. For this new, upcoming exhibition, Claire Tabouret has returned to portraiture. For the first time, Tabouret chooses to paint subjects from her own life. Depicting figures drawn from her relatives and friends, the artist's canvases, boards and works on paper to be presented in London are steeped in personal experience, unfurling a universe of stories and memories. Indeed, through this new body of work, Claire Tabouret continues to explore an intimist and introspective oeuvre.
Claire Tabouret is acclaimed for her figurative paintings of groups and characters, sometimes sharing an affinity with the spirit of Romantic painting. Tabouret has stated that her paintings develop in two parallel processes, either taking form by bringing out lightness against a darker space, or vice versa, working from a lighter background and populating it with darker figures. This is partly the result of the artist's move to California, where she discovered a light which, in its brightness, was capable of at once illuminating and blinding.
Rather than identifying seriality in her production, Tabouret believes her practice comprises separate, distinct bodies of work. She explains that these are born out of canvas, paper and other supports that, at any one time, cohabit her studio: this results in the artist taking from each work in progress, borrowing elements for another work, in an act of cross-pollination. Switching from one painting to another, each of her bodies of work emerges as a unified whole, an organic ensemble, refusing any industrial seriality. Thus, when a number of works leave the studio at the same time, they tend to be inhabited by shared traits, and to present common themes. Tabouret's works on paper, in the form of monotypes, occupy a key place in her overall creative process, generating the artist's narrative, and paving the way for her canvasses and other works.
Claire Tabouret was born in 1981 in Pertuis, France. She lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Currently, Tabouret is the subject of the solo exhibition If Only The Sea Could Sleep at HAB Galerie in Nantes, France. The artist has had a number of recent showings: she was presented in Eldorama at Tripostal in Lille, France, and in Les Enfants du Paradis at MUba in Tourcoing, France, as well as at the Château de Boisgeloup and the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France, both in 2018. A former student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Tabouret has gained prominence over the course of the past ten years, and her work is considered amongst the most powerful in the contemporary renaissance of figuration. Paintings by Claire Tabouret currently feature in several prestigious private and public collections, such as the Pinault Collection, in Venice (Italy), the Collection Lambert in Avignon (France), LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (USA), and FRAC Auvergne (France).
A text by Joachim Pissarro will accompany the exhibition.
Press release courtesy Almine Rech.
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