Press release
From April 28 to May 30, 1998, the Michael Werner Gallery in Cologne is showing: Jean Fautrier. Black Paintings and Other Early Works.
What Alfred Barr remarked in New York in 1930 about an exhibition of Fautrier's work at the Museum of Modern Art applies in a similar way to the artist's works exhibited at Galerie Michael Werner, most of which were painted in the 1920s. "Among the new Romantics, Fautrier is unique for his ability to bring the problem of objectivity, which is generally still life, into an atmosphere of dark terror."
On display are nineteen paintings and three bronze sculptures that provide a representative overview of the early work of French artist Jean Fautrier. At the same time, the exhibition highlights the uniqueness of his painting in a period marked by the movements of Surrealism and Abstraction, as well as Cubism and Expressionism.
On view are still lifes, heads, and nudes that appear as equally important elements in Fautrier's idiosyncratic painting. Without spatial foreshortening, perspective, or specially treated details, he places his objects in an enigmatically dark and indeterminable space. While bright sections against a dark background create the space, a few lights and scribbled marks suggest an object. What is evoked is a spatial appearance that is characteristic of the artist's early work.
The exhibited sculptures of the artist are a clarifying complement to this. Simplified, coarse forms there form the three-dimensional counterpart to the paintings.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalog with 21 color illustrations and a text by Castor Seibel.
For further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.