Georges Mathieu

G E O R G E S M A T H I E U
Sept. 9 - Oct. 23, 2021

Opening reception | Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2021
Nahmad Contemporary | 10 am - 6 pm
Perrotin | 12 - 8 pm

In celebration of the 100th birthday of Georges Mathieu (1921-2012), Perrotin and Nahmad Contemporary, in collaboration with the artist’s estate, are pleased to mount the first extensive survey dedicated to Georges Mathieu, founder of Lyrical Abstraction and a pioneer of Action Painting, in the United States.

Spread across two New York venues, the presentation reevaluates Mathieu’s significant contributions to the development of post-war abstraction. As a key pioneer of Action Painting, the exhibition will pay particular attention to the artist’s monumental paintings, which exemplify his commitment to the encounter between body and canvas, and which will be presented for the first time in New York.

To mark the occasion, we are pleased to publish the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s life and work, with an essay by Germano Celant and an interview with Nancy Spector.

Georges Mathieu was one of the foremost French artists active during the 1950s and 60s. The centenary of his birth offers an ideal occasion to look back at the career of an artist and theorist who dedicated his life to an emotive, gestural, and highly nonrepresentational form of abstraction that had no correlative in the empirical world. The founder of Lyrical Abstraction, a movement that rejected the legacy of European geometric abstraction launched by Picasso’s Cubism and Mondrian’s De Stijl, Mathieu deeply influenced generations of artists working in the realm of performance and action-based painting. — Nancy Spector