42nd Art Basel Fair

Dear friends of the gallery,

Our tribute to Henri Prosi has just opened at the gallery, featuring thirty years of creative activity that served as a perfect excuse to publish a handsome catalogue. Prosi’s startling, highly varied yet logical oeuvre conveys both rigor and a constant quest for new forms of expression. Each of his periods can be related to the previous one, and together they form a highly coherent whole. Many of you already own a work by Prosi, so don’t miss a retrospective where you may well find a work that complements your collection.

At Basel the theme of our stand will be “Auguste Herbin and His Circle.” Herbin served as master to an entire generation of artists in the 1950s, at a time when Paris was still the worldwide capital of art. The many artists drawn to Paris notably sought to exhibit at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, over which Herbin himself presided, and which was the logical extension of the Abstraction–Creation movement that had formed around him back on the 1930s.

Countless artists acquired their visual idiom from Herbin or were influenced by him. We will be showing several whose development was indebted to him, such as Victor Vasarely, Jean Dewasne, Edgar Pillet and Georges Folmer (who was close to all our artists and whose daughter has kindly lent us some canvases and a rare sculpture). Also represented will be Aurélie Nemours (works in gouache and oil from private collections), Véra Molnar, Jo Delahaut, and Olle Baertling, plus three fine gouaches by Geneviève Claisse, a student of Herbin who edited his catalogue raisonné.

Of course, our contemporary artists will also be represented at Basel, notably new works by Jean-Gabriel Coignet and Jean-François Dubreuil. And those of you who missed the Charles Bézie and Antoine Perrot shows will be able to discover their work at the fair. Perrot’s fertile imagination has spawned the elaboration of a “collective autobiography,” titled Fortune Paintings, based on the colors of everyday objects and materials. The playful quality of Perrot’s recent work accompanies a theoretical exploration of “imported” colors that the artist has pursued with great success.

A trend toward increasingly geometric construction is currently surfacing in the art world, so numerous gallery owners not previously known for exhibiting art construit suddenly have such works on their stands at international fairs, which validates our own aesthetic choices.

Do come and see the works on our stand—we look forward to greeting you there.

Until then, best wishes from us all.

ANNE and JEAN-CLAUDE LAHUMIERE
and the entire gallery team