
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Rouen (FR) 10 February 2023 - 8 January 2024
Martin Barré. Les œuvres de la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art
Following Simon Hantaï (2020) and Judit Reigl (2021), abstract painter Martin Barré takes the central stage of this third edition of the partnership between the Réunion des Musées Métropolitains and the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art. The exhibition "Martin Barré. Les oeuvres de la Fondation Gandur pour l'Art", presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen from February 10 to September 18, 2023, spotlights an artist now considered one of the most inventive in post-war European painting.
Curator: Bertrand Dumas
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.

MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS DE ROUEN
Esplanade Marcel Duchamp
76000 Rouen, France
Free entrance
opening times
Monday - Sunday, 10 am - 6 pm
Artworks in focus
March 2017 Fine Arts
57-50-B by Martin Barré
Highlighted by the Centre Pompidou which will devote to his work a retrospective starting November 2018, Martin Barré (Nantes, 1924 – Paris, 1993) is one of the most remarkable French artists of abstract art from the post-war period. He never ceased in his examination of a painting and its limitations by progressively developing a very personal style which aimed, according to his own terms, for "reduction-concentration". His art tends to reach the fundamental elements of painting through reduction of the object, material, colour, form and gesture. This earned him a posteriori to be designated as one of the precursors of Minimal Art in France.
Publication
February 2023 Exhibition catalogue