A seminal figure of lyrical abstraction, Olivier Debré sought to portray the emotional experience of natural phenomena; aptly coining his work as fervent abstraction. Born in 1920, Debré joined the Paris École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture under Le Corbusier. It was from this formal training that he developed an important understanding of space, later reflecting that “painting is an organization of space”.
A seminal figure of lyrical abstraction, Olivier Debré sought to portray the emotional experience of natural phenomena; aptly coining his work as fervent abstraction. Born in 1920, Debré joined the Paris École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture under Le Corbusier. It was from this formal training that he developed an important understanding of space, later reflecting that “painting is an organization of space”.
In his early works, Debré can be seen to reference Picasso, whom he visited many times at his studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins, in Paris. After the war ended, however, Debré became part of a new generation of enigmatic expressive painters belonging to the École des Beaux-Arts Paris, along with Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Stael, Serge Poliakoff and Maria Elena Vieira da Silva. During this time Debré’s paintings were heavily influenced by Japanese calligraphy in gouache and ink, much like Soulages and Franz Kline.
At the beginning of the 1950s, his work became marked by a considered palette of muted colours. Using a knife in flat areas of colour concentrated on the horizontal plane, or large vertical compositions, Debré produced abstract still lifes with broad impasto from which the full-length silhouette of a man are often apparent. During the 1960s Debré’s palette adopted intense, vivid colours, after encountering the work of Mark Rothko and Jules Olitski. Painting outside, fully immersed in the landscape, employing strong accents of colour over fluid, vibrant backgrounds, Debré produced his fervent colour field paintings. Seeking to remove any border between the perception of the landscape as observed and its expression on the canvas, broad fields of colour are marked by fluid weightless painting, in which light and transparency are allowed to dawn, punctuated by a few concretions that produce relief on the edges of the painting.
Debré’s work was the subject of many retrospectives before his death in 1999 and continues to be celebrated across the world. In 1967, he represented France at the Montreal World Exhibition and retrospectives held at Jeu de Paume, Paris (1995); Museum of Fine Arts, Mexico (1997); the History Museum, Beijing (1998) and the Centre du Pompidou, Paris (2003).
During the 1980s, he collaborated with several theatre productions receiving commissions from the Hong Kong Opera and the Opera House of Shanghai. In 1997 he designed the iconic set for the Paris Opera Ballet’s ballet Signes, choreographed by Carolyn Carlson, which will be reperformed in June 2023 at Opéra Bastille.
