Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (PT) 17 February 2022 - 29 May 2022
Gérard Fromanger. O Esplendor
Part of the France-Portugal Season 2022, the Gérard Fromanger (1939-2021) exhibition at Lisbon's Museu Coleção Berardo features a number of series that characterise the artist's work: twenty-six in all, including more than sixty major paintings, drawings and silksreen print as well as his Film-tract from 1968, which was made with Jean-Luc Godard.
Curator : Éric Corne
Each period, comprising reassessments, ruptures, recompositions, and different techniques, forms a highly coherent whole. The series have an internal logic within the artist’s work and mark the different eras within his personal biography, his encounters, and his relationship with current events and, more broadly, with history.
Red of all colours and shades permeates Gérard Fromanger’s painting to such an extent that Jacques Prévert imagined, like Klein blue, a Fromanger red.
Gérard Fromanger’s œuvre is that of a great explorer of the world around him, in permanent sympathy with Walter Benjamin’s flâneur aesthetic, and even with Guy Debord’s dérives.
In historical terms, the artist’s work converges with Pop Art, displaying his preference for bold, non-modulated colours, but is also in constant revolt against any categorical form of artistic convention. His conversions to various practices led him to remain constantly open to new ideas. His exploration of all the traditional themes of painting – portraiture, nudes, landscape, mythology, history painting – places him within the continuum of art history, but his form, devoid of all symbolism, implies at the same time a rupture. Fromanger’s work is that of the tension between the figurable, the representable (bodies, landscapes, cities, etc.), and that which resists: the unrepresentable, the uncertain, with its stretches of abstract painting.
Museu Coleção Berardo
Praça do Império
1449-003 Lisboa, Portugal
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