About the Artist

“My vocabulary is open to the research of movement – and of multiple spaces – which animates the plan of the painted surface. The circle and the triangle, addressed one after the other and separately, are my favorite topics of serial compositions, where the extreme simplicity of the shapes is transfigured by the intensity - each time different of the color relationships.” - Geneviève Claisse


Geneviève Claisse, who specialized in geometric abstraction, was born in 1935, in Quievy, France. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, during which time her approach to painting was  also influenced by reading Art d’Aujourd’hui (Art of Today), a publication created to defend and promote geometric abstraction and the synthesis of the arts, published between June 1949 and December 1954.

Claisse was the great niece of artist Auguste Herbin, a founder of the French group of artists known as Abstraction-Création. Herbin saw Claisse's work for the first time when she was eighteen years old, and encouraged her to continue painting.  In Herbin's mind, Claisse was "le successeur désigné par le destin et par l'hérédité" ("the successor appointed by destiny and heredity"). In the late 1950s, Genevieve worked as an assistant in Herbin's studio. At this young age she worked tirelessly, often working at night after a day in the studio, carefully painting abstract forms on bold, colorful canvases.

Like Herbin, Claisse shows a devotion to the ideals of formal purity and the perfection of execution. 

Claisse’s work is a rigorous exploration of geometric abstraction, which began in 1958 and went through various creative phases. Her early works were lyrical abstractions treated in vivid patches of solid color. She later expanded her vocabulary in her search for movement and multiple spaces that would animate the flatness of the painted surface. Circles and triangles, which the artist treats in turns and independently, are the two recurring themes in her serial compositions, in which the extreme simplicity of the shapes is transfigured by the variations in color ratios.

Claisse’s two-dimensional kinetic approach reached a new peak in the mid-1970s when she temporarily gave up shapes and colors in favor of the geometric play of black lines on a white background. Enhanced by what she learned, her work reverted to a comparative treatment of color, which the artist chose to use with the strictest economy of means. Claisse reduced her compositions to precisely executed and sensitively balanced compositions, alternating solid color blocks and lines. During this transitional period, the white background became a permanent feature in her work.

Claisse’s works have been exhibited in the Galerie Caille, Cambrai; Palais de Beaux-Arts, Lille; La Chaux-de-Fonds (Biennale de Paris, 1967); Galeried;Eendt, Amsterdam; and Galerie Hyber and Galerie Denise René, Paris.

Her works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Hirschhorn Foundation, Washington, D.C.; Musée Matisse du Cateau-Cambrésis ; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Musées des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux de Fonds; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Collection UNESCO, Paris; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch/Stuttgart; FRAC-Ile de France; and the LaM, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France, among others.