Martin Barré (Nantes, 1924 – Paris, 1993) is an artist whose practice remained in constant mutation over the 40 years of his career. According to Bertrand Dumas, the exhibition's curator and curator of fine arts at the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, "No dullness or stops appear in the oeuvre of Martin Barré. It is all about research and questioning. This personal imperative, combined with formalistic boldness, is particularly present at the turn of the 1960s."

The fourteen works on show, made between 1956 and 1967, illustrate the decisive decade when Martin Barré performed a reduction and concentration of pictorial means. The artist deconstructed the codes of abstract painting then in use to obtain the minimalism he pursued. Among the solutions he explored, the artist limited his colour palette to hues of black and brown. He cluttered and agglomerated shapes across the white backgrounds of his paintings and adopted an economical use of material.

From the 1960s onwards, paint straight from the tubes and later from spray cans replaced the initial brush or knife painting techniques. Martin Barré's use of spray paint from 1963 et 1967 was pioneering. From this radical time, the exhibition displays, for the first time since 1967, the study for the curtain of the front stage of the Maison de la Culture de Grenoble designed by architect André Wogenscky, a follower of Le Corbusier.

The exhibition "Martin Barré. Les œuvres de la Fondation Gandur pour l'Art" comes with the release of a catalogue including all of the artist’s paintings comprised in the Collection.