GENEVIÈVE
CLAISSE
1935 - 2018

Geneviève Claisse was born in Quiévy in 1935 and died in Dreux on April 30, 2018. Her pictorial vocation was born from the reading of the magazine "Art d'aujourd'hui", a platform for geometric abstraction. Her work is a rigorous exploration of this path and she will never be tempted to deviate from it. "Schoolgirl, I was already abstract," she said.
Since 1958, it has adhered to the ideas of the Abstraction Creation movement created by Herbin. In 1960, her contribution to the Salon de Mai shows a work of organisation of the space rich in colours, where the interplay of simple forms and the subtle interplay of colours is already striking in its vigour and sensitivity. In 1961, her first exhibition was organized at the Denise René Gallery in Paris, where she has been exhibiting regularly since then.
In the 1965's, she accentuated her work on colour. It was during these years that Geneviève Claisse distinguished herself from the influence of Auguste Herbin and Mondrian. In the mid-1960s, triangle and circle became, treated separately, her formal vocabulary which introduced her into kinetic research applied to surfaces. She then concentrated on purifying her creations, always and inevitably geometric, both in terms of form and choice of colours. Reflections and research accompany an overflowing creativity, in parallel with the development of Optical Art and Kinetic Art. In 1967, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Chaux-de-Fond exhibited works from the past ten years, then a major Swiss collector exhibited in Zurich, alongside works by great masters of contemporary art, some thirty Claisse paintings acquired between 1959 and 1967. Other important and significant exhibitions over time will show her work (Oslo, Alençon, Lille, etc.). In 1989, a retrospective of her work was organized at the Matisse Museum in Cateau-Cambrésis.