Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier (born 1962) is a French painter who works in France after years of studies in China. She was the first non-Chinese woman to be awarded a post-graduate diploma in fine arts by the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China. Fabienne Verdier was born in 1962, Paris, France. In 1985, at 22, Verdier left for China to study at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing. She chose at the same time to work alongside and train with the last great Chinese painters who had survived the Cultural Revolution, whom she persuaded to transmit their mastery of spontaneous painting and aesthetic theories despite continued bans. After becoming the first foreign woman to be awarded a post-graduate diploma in fine arts by the institute, Verdier began to progressively create her own new abstract painting. Verdier's artistic path has taken her through successive phases of research, all focused on her fundamental areas of interest, including the dynamism of forces of nature, the instantaneous and enduring, and incessant movement. By adopting new tools and ever-larger brushstrokes, she proposes to enable viewers to better access the infinite world of energy and transformations she extensively explores. For the 50th anniversary edition of Le Petit Robert, France's household dictionary invited Verdier to celebrate the creative forces of the French language. Having been given a carte blanche, Verdier collaborated with lexicographer Alain Rey to create 22 works organized around word pairs such as arborescence-allegory, force-form, rhythm-reflection and duality-dialogue that appear in fold out pages throughout the text. Many of the paintings were exhibited at the Musée Voltaire in Geneva in late 2017 in a show organized by the Bibliothèque de Genève, coordinated by Alexandre Vanautgaerden. The art book Polyphonies, a co-publication of Albin Michel and Editions Robert, goes behind the scenes of the project to explore its three-year genesis and highlights the extensive artistic research behind the work in the form of preparatory collages.