“Claude Viallat” Installation view ©Johyun Gallery SeoulJohyun Gallery presents “Claude Viallat”, a solo exhibition by Claude Viallat (b. 1936), through August 18, at its Seoul branch. The exhibition features a total of 10 works, including the artist’s most recent works.
Claude Viallat’s artistic practice has no plan other than to persist in existence. Constantly expressing the here-and-now, Viallat’s works are composed of a series of universal shapes, likened to sponges, beans, or bits of bone. The artist describes his work as an “unconscious practice” in which the hues and tones of paint seep and spread across the surfaces of various materials, creating an infinite number of chance encounters.
The artist, who turned 88 last year, first tried working with hanji for the first time at a solo exhibition at Johyun Gallery in Busan last year. While the patterns printed on hanji, a traditional Korean medium, are vivid and delicate, revealing on the surface the moment of encounter when the materiality of the surface attracts color, the works presented in this exhibition at Johyun Gallery further emphasize the organic forms of living things, which are based on repeated patterns and constitute an ever-changing yet tentative harmony.
Born in 1936 in Nîmes, southern France, Claude Viallat, who lives and works in Nîmes, studied painting under the tutelage of Raymond Legueult at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier from 1955 to 1959 and at the Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1962 to 1963. In 1982 he had a retrospective at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, and in 1988 he was the French artist represented at the Venice Biennale, where he created the stained glass windows of the cathedral of Verdun.
He taught in Nice, Limoges, Marseille, and Paris, and served as dean of Nîmes University. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Musée National d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the MoMA in New York, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montréa, and the National Museum of Art in Osaka.
