Made in Nîmes

Galerie Templon is inaugurating the spring season by bringing a legend of the French contemporary art scene to New York. Claude Viallat, now 88, is exhibiting at Templon’s US space for the first time. He fills the gallery with the endlessly repeated small bone shape that revolutionized the art world in the 1970s, when he launched the Supports/Surfaces movement with a group of fellow artists. A pioneering figure of the avant-garde movement, he has spent almost half a century turning his back on stretchers and canvases and defying the codes of painting, volume and space. He quickly built an international reputation: he was selected to represent his country on the French pavilion at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988, while his work has featured in a wide range of major public collections, including at MoMA in New York, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal and Philadelphia Museum of Art in the USA. His work borrows from sources as varied as rock art, Native American culture and bullfighting. Right from the 1970s, his work has revealed a particular interest in the US art scene, as demonstrated by the discreet drips that crop up here and there on Viallat’s military tarpaulins, scarves and luxury fabric offcuts. The exhibition presents a brand new series of twenty carefully selected medium and large format works painted between the 1960s and now. They include disconcerting industrial tarpaulins with visible seams as well as irresistible lengths of material with Provençal motifs. The pieces create a complex interplay of colours, fullness and emptiness on the walls of the New York gallery. Claude Viallat was born in 1936 in Nimes, France, where he continues to live and work. The creation of the Supports/Surfaces movement saw him quickly gain international recognition, and his work was included in solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Miami, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Milan, Ankara and Montreal. It currently features in leading public collections such as at the National d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou and National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan. The many solo exhibitions of his work include shows at the Venet Foundation in southeastern France (2019), Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2014), Ludwig Museum in Germany (2014), Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico (2004), MuBe in Brazil (2001), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany (1983) and Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris (1982). A large-scale installation Claude Viallat created in 1982 was exhibited in 2018 at Art Basel Unlimited. Galerie Templon has represented him for over twenty years.

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