Touraine, Autumn 1964
Oil on canvas, signed and dated on the back
60 x 73 cm
Born in 1920, Olivier Debré is the grandson of the painter Edouard Debat-Ponsan, who will never stop encouraging his artistic vocation. Admitted to the architecture section of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, he also attended Le Corbusier's studio. In 1937, he received an aesthetic shock in front of Picasso's Guernica. This influence was decisive for Debré, who then abandoned figuration to devote herself to the abstract expression of the sign, a vector of emotion and thought. In 1949, the young painter had his first solo exhibition at the Bing Gallery. Having become one of the leading figures of the Ecole de Paris, he federated around him Hartung, Staël, Poliakov and Soulages. From the 1960s onwards, Debré devoted himself exclusively to landscape. He paints outdoors and communicates with nature through what he calls "fervent abstraction".
His almost monochrome canvases most often adopt a format as grandiloquent as the Touraine nature that inspires him.
Internationally renowned, Olivier Debré's talent is celebrated through travelling exhibitions and retrospectives until his death in 1999.
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