Art Basel

This year on our stand we will highlight the period of Auguste Herbin’s Plastic Alphabet (1882-1960) which began around 1942, the last of his career, the most iconic, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) had made it a poem, Auguste Herbin painted it. Two years separate him from André Derain (1880-1954), at the end of his career, unlike the latter, Auguste Herbin is innovative, he opens a field of exploration to a whole next generation of artists, such as Olle Baertling (1911-1981), Jo Delahaut (1911-1992), Jean Dewasne (1921-1999), Günter Fruhtrunk (1921-1982), or even Victor Vasarely (1906-1997). A number of artists have gravitated to Herbin, including Geneviève Claisse (1935-2018), also author of her catalog raisonné.

In 1950, Paris was the obligatory passage for artists of geometric abstraction. The Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, directed by Auguste Herbin, was very popular for its rigor and the defense of this art. Herbin had written "Non-figurative non-objective Art", published in 1949 edited by Lydia Conti. Auguste Herbin shares his thoughts on art, putting man back at the center of nature ; explaining that colors come from nature, that universal shapes are geometric shapes, understandable by all, and that the artist is a free creator if he agrees to create without ulterior motives, without calculation, and therefore through his works, he donated his whole person to the community : his plastic alphabet was born. the work of Auguste Herbin will be the subject of a retrospective in a Parisian institution in March 2024.

Works exclusively from our collection, amassed over nearly 40 years, have for the most part been loaned to monographic and museum exhibitions. For a certain number of them we will propose the preparatory drawing, the gouache and the final canvas. This presentation will be echoed by some works by the artists who surrounded him, such as Geneviève Claisse or Olle Baertling.

Let’s not forget our contemporaries who continue to keep this trend alive, especially in Switzerland, our faithful Hans-Jörg Glattfelder, will be there, accompanied by a great lady of abstract painting, Ode Bertrand. Hans-Jörg Glattfelder will be awarded the Aurelie Nemours prize in September in Paris. This prize rewards any artist, regardless of his discipline, whose work pursues the rigorous plastic quest. Glattfelder’s research on the non-Euclidean plane since the 1970s has led him to produce works whose vision makes us doubt our ability to see. He unbalances us, through angular shapes, which are neither quite diamonds nor quite rectangles, he plays with us with vanishing angles on the plane.

For more information it’s here