Allouche Benias Gallery is pleased to announce the preview of “Landscape: A Philosophy of Form” (Paintings from 2005 to 2019), a solo show by French - American artist Vicky Colombet. The artist’s first solo show in Greece.
Vicky Colombet is exploring a territory where abstraction and nature meet, developing an imagery of unusual, complex beauty. Her art reveals a deep insight into nature that exists in conversation with various historical movements, from traditional Chinese Painting to Abstract Expressionism.
One of the truisms of art is that we can never rule out abstraction in figuration, nor the other way around. Colombet is particularly interesting because her art continues a dialogue between the two ways of seeing, preferencing neither in favor of a synthesis of both.
Colombet, who makes her own colors using natural gem and earth pigments, is working out a language that owes its power to nature and the sublime. Her singular vision juggles the opposition of representation and abstraction. Her art is, indeed, based upon an objective, nearly scholarly research into the relations between the two, and extends our knowledge of art’s ability to communicate effects that are inherently mysterious but truly compelling as things to see.
“Colombet is not interested in reproducing specific objects such as the exact forms and patterns of the landscape. But the landscape exists, nevertheless, in the power of the movement of the elements, the traces and marks of wind, water, rain and the expanse of space. The picture draws us into it. The space invites us to participate actively in the journey and explore its reality, achieving our own experience as we wander through.” Nena Tsouti-Schillinger (“Nothing To See From The Ground”, Catalogue essay from Haim Chanin Fine Arts Gallery, New York, 2005)
Vicky Colombet (b. 1953), lives and works between New York City, the Hudson Valley and Paris. She has lived and maintained studios in Paris, the South of France, Barcelona and the Cévennes before finally settling in New York City, where she has a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Musee Marmottan Monet, the Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Tucson Museum of Art. She is a recipient of the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014). A member of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in Manhattan since 2004. In the spring of 2020, “Vicky Colombet: In Dialogue with Claude Monet” will open at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (March to September 2020).
