Martin Barré. Les œuvres de la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art

After Simon Hantaï (2020) and Judit Reigl (2021), the painter Martin Barré is at the centre of this third edition of the partnership between the Réunion des Musées Métropolitains and the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art. The exhibition Martin Barré. Les œuvres de la Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, organised at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen from 10 February to 17 September 2023, highlights this artist whose abstract work has become one of the most original in European painting of the second half of the 20th century.

 

Martin Barré (Nantes, 1924 - Paris, 1993) is an artist whose practice has remained in constant mutation throughout his forty-year career. As Bertrand Dumas, curator of the exhibition and curator of the fine arts collections at the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, points out, "there is no plateau or suspension with Martin Barré; everything is research and constant questioning. This personal requirement, combined with a real formal audacity, was particularly creative at the turn of the 1960s.

 

Painted between 1956 and 1967, the fourteen works presented in the exhibition Martin Barré. The works in the Gandur Foundation for Art illustrate the decisive decade during which the artist proceeded to a reduction-concentration of pictorial means. The artist thus engaged in a deconstruction of the codes of abstract painting in force at the time in order to achieve the minimalism to which he aspired.