FABIENNE VERDIER

Early Years

Fabienne Verdier was born in Paris in 1962. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse but was disenchanted with the programme and moved to China to study calligraphy and traditional painting techniques—a totally different approach to the way she had worked in France. “The masters gave me a piece of white paper and a brush and told me to paint my spiritual view of tree branches,” she has said, talking about the experience. “When I wanted to go out and paint what I saw, they laughed at me. They explained that there’s no good looking at a tree, or a landscape. You must, by force of contemplation, be at one with the thing you are painting. It took me a long time to realise that if I wanted to bring something new to painting, I would have to learn this thousand-year culture.” After 10 years, she returned to France in 1993 (with an illness that meant she only weighed 30kg at the time), moving to a hamlet in the Val d’Oise.

Fabienne Verdier: Artworks

Fabienne Verdier’s art combines principles of Eastern art (spontaneity, unity) with a Western aesthetic of line and abstraction. Returning to France following a decade in China, she used Chinese brush techniques with Western acrylic paints, developing giant horsetail brushes that she hung from her studio ceiling. She later refined this further, adding the “brush” to bicycle handlebars that she could move around to guide it, and developing paint “wells” that could be filled and moved like piping nozzles.

• The Sound Trace series of 2014 came about because of an invitation from the Juilliard School for Fabienne Verdier to work with musicians, allowing the sound to dictate her brushstrokes and creating a dialogue between painting and music that spanned visual art and performance. Verdier used the project as an opportunity to refresh her creative thinking. “The ‘encounter’ with the world of sound was very disruptive, “ she said. “Suddenly, I found myself disagreeing profoundly with my practice as a painter up to now.”
• The Rainbow Paintings series of 78 large-format works came from a project in which Verdier began a dialogue with the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Matthias Grünewald around 1516. Verdier was interested in Grünewald’s use of light, and her works portrayed auras of light as seen during the death of stars, likening the end of human life and representations of death as a way of transmitting energy to the living.
• Verdier’s Walking Paintings, such as 2023’s yellow-and-black Était-ce le printemps ? Était-ce l’été ? and Le rideau des horizons are achieved using a technique where the artist swapped her brush for a piping funnel, through which paint flows as she passed along the canvas, controlling the paint to achieve a long, continuous gesture.

Fabienne Verdier: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Aria, Waddington Custot, London (2026)
• Poétique de la ligne, Domaine de Chaumont-Sur-Loire (2025)
• France Mute, Cité de l’architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris (2025)
• Retables, Waddington Custot, London (2024) (and touring)
• Rainbow Paintings, Valode and Pistre, Paris (2024)
• Energy Lines, Christie’s, Custot Gallery Dubai (2023)
• Fabienne Verdier, Patrick Derom Gallery, Brussels (2022)
• The Song of Stars, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar (2022)
• Sur les terres de Cézanne, Musée Granet and Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme, Aix-en-Provence (2019)
• Vide—Vibration, Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne (2017)
• Rhythms and Reflections, Waddington Custot, London (2016) *Energy Fields, Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris (2013)
• Abbaye de Silvacane (2004)
• Pacific Cultural Foundation, Taipei (1997)
• Contemporary Art Centre, Hong Kong (1993)
• French Cultural Centre, Beijing (1991)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Hommage à Pierre Dax, Waddington Custot, Paris (2026)
• The Shape of Colour, Waddington Custot, London (2025)
• Sammlung Looser, Kunsthaus Zürich (2024)
• La Mouvance de la Matière, M&M Saradar Collection, Château Lynch-Bages, Pauillac (2023)
• Picasso, Gorky, Warhol: Sculptures and Works on Paper, Hubert Looser Collection, Kunsthalle Zurich (2019)
• Un Autre Œil, d’Apollinaire à Aujourd’hui, Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, Issoudun (2018) (and touring)
• The World Meets Here, Custot Gallery Dubai (2016)
• Flux, Art Plural Gallery, Singapore (2014)
• Not for Sale, Art Centre Passage de Retz, Paris (2011)
• elles@centrepompidou, Paris (2009)
• Expansion Résonance, Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris (2008)
• Peintures, Dessins, Sculptures et Estampes, Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne (2007)
• Accrochages, Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne (2006)
• Oeuvres sur Papier, Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne (2005)
• Contemporary Brushstrokes, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (1990)

Further Reading

• Fabienne Verdier’s website
• 2023/2019 interview and studio visit from Christie’s
• Profile in Wallpaper to coincide with Verdier’s exhibitions in Aix-en-Provence
• Conversation in Ocula from 2014

Fabienne Verdier FAQs

Ocula