Oil on canvas

100 × 65 cm. 393/8 × 255/8 in.

Signed in English and dated on bottom left

LITERATURE
2014, Vision of Abstraction, Opera Gallery, Dubai, p.20
EXHIBTED
11 – 25 Mar 2014, Vision of Abstraction, Opera Gallery, Dubai

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Opera Gallery, Dubai
Important Private Collection, Europe

Note: This work is attached with a label from Montreal Dominion Gallery and a label from New York Opera Gallery on the reverse

Existence is Resistance
A Classic Work from the Peak Creative Period of Georges Mathieu in the 1960s
“What I am passionate about is to confront the violence of my paintings to the violence of the typhoons, hurricanes but also the strange shapes and colors of my works to your magnificent, exuberant, and extraordinary nature.”
— Georges Mathieu
In the 1950s, the works of Georges Mathieu, one of the founders of European lyrical abstraction, together with those of US abstract expressionist artist, established their own unique artistic benchmark. They also created an important link between Abstract Art, Happening Art, American Abstract Expressionism and European Modernist work, as part of the broader 20th century embrace of abstraction. Mathieu’s works have been collected by nearly 100 major art museums in 17 countries around the world, including the New York Museum of Modern art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo etc. and he has been called the greatest contemporary artist since Picasso.
Georges Mathieu was born into a banking family in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1921. As a young man, Mathieu studied literature, law and philosophy and read extensively, developing a foundation for his future highly spiritual art work. In 1942, he started teaching at the lycee in Douai and during his spare time painted a London landscape, his first painting. Mathieu later read a book by English author Edward Crankshaw that inspired him “to treat art as a method of expression.” In 1944, the artist produced his first batch of “non-figuration” works and three years later held his first public solo exhibition. These broke with the geometric abstractions of Kasimir Malevich and Mondrian, creating outstanding lyrical abstraction works, with Mathieu being praised by the French Minister of Culture at the time Andre Malraux as “a Western calligrapher.” After World War II, the artist went to the US, where the highly spiritual intellectual inquiry and learned background of his artistic vision enabled his art to stand out from the abstract expressionist paintings of such older abstract masters as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. At the same time, he also painted in public before the action art of maverick French action painter Yves Klein, transforming the creative process into something akin to painting consciousness challenging the canvas.
A Peak Period Replete with Light and Color
The work offered at the spring auction, Argyropec, was painted in 1967 and is representative of Georges Mathieu’s peak period of creativity in the 1960s. At that time, the artist extended his creative motifs to modern life and was inspired by Eastern calligraphy and painting, while attaching importance to extreme changes in geometric shapes and the intuitive sense of speed.
In this painting, Mathieu, as always, uses a monochrome base and “writes” Chinese text-made semiotics in red and black brushstrokes against a simple dark yellow background. Moreover, by reducing the density of the lines as they move from the center to the periphery he ensures the “image area” at the right of the picture presents an internal momentum of lines radiating outwards. As the black and red lines intersect, an explosive power builds up with internal potential energy suddenly released, in a way that is reminiscent of the coming together and separation of molecules. This displays the sense of order represented by the evolution of form in physics, with Mathieu transforming the picture through abstraction into a “non-lieu” arena, wherein power belongs to different time and space. The dispersed red and black lines are centered on “nothingness,” showcasing the mystery of fractured power.
Abstract Perspective Embracing East and West
As an artistic work, Argyropec can be placed somewhere in between action art painting and Eastern calligraphy, demonstrating the multiple points of commonality between the freehand oil paintings of Georges Mathieu and artists such as Zao Wou-ki etc. The source of this can be traced back to the traditional Chinese artistic idea that “Painting and Calligraphy have the same origin.” In this painting, Mathieu deliberately leaves the large yellow area “blank,” selecting one part of the picture to construct images. The overlapping vertical and horizontal lines wander along the right part of the canvas, extending ever outwards like vines. The bright blue lines that seem to almost pour from the top of the work are a veritable title label, traversing thematic objects and echoing the way in which the red and black lines at the bottom “grow” in a downwards direction, imbuing the work with perpendicular spatial momentum.

Price estimate:
HKD: 500,000 - 800,000
USD: 64,100 - 102,600

Auction Result:
HKD: 590,000