Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier (b.1962, Paris) is a French abstract painter known for exploring the dynamism of natural forces through a unique synthesis of Western and Eastern art traditions. Her work melds the aesthetics of Western art – line, action and abstraction – with the principles of traditional Eastern art, such as unity, spontaneity and asceticism. Verdier paints vertically using giant brushes and custom-made tools, suspended from the studio ceiling and positioned directly above the canvas.

In 1984, as a young graduate of l’École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, Verdier was awarded a postgraduate scholarship to study at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in China. She left France to immerse herself in calligraphy, studying with some of the last great Chinese painters who had survived the Cultural Revolution. This period of intense apprenticeship lasted nearly a decade and is chronicled in her 2005 autobiography, Passagère du Silence: Dix ans d'initiation en Chine. In 2024 this bestselling text was translated into English by Young Kim and published with new colour photographs and a glossary of aesthetic terms that add richness to Verdier’s beautiful narrative.

Verdier’s work has been widely exhibited across Europe and internationally, including in Beijing, Brussels, Lausanne, London, Paris, Rome, Singapore, Taipei and Zurich. In 2011, she was featured in the exhibition ‘The Art of Deceleration: from Caspar David Friedrich to Ai Wei Wei’ at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany and collaborated with architect Jean Nouvel on designs for the National Art Museum of China project in Beijing. The Hubert Looser Foundation in Zurich, which had commissioned several of her works, presented her paintings in a 2012 exhibition at Vienna’s Kunstforum alongside pieces by Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly. In 2013, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, Belgium showcased Verdier’s work in dialogue with Flemish Primitives such as Van Eyck and Memling.

In 2014, Verdier created an installation of seven works for ‘Köningsklasse II’, organised by the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and participated in the group show ‘Formes Simple’s at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. That same year, she was artist-in-residence at The Juilliard School in New York, where she studied the breathing techniques of sopranos, painting the sound of Mozart’s arias. In 2017, Verdier was invited to compose a visual partita for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and was commissioned to design the official poster for the Roland-Garros French Open. In 2018, Verdier set up a nomadic studio on Montagne Sainte-Victoire, famously depicted in over 30 paintings by Paul Cézanne. This series was exhibited alongside Cézanne’s works in her celebrated 2019 retrospective at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence. In 2020, Verdier embarked on an important new series, Vortex. Inspired by her earlier residency at The Juilliard School, these paintings express the melodies of operatic arias in the form of a large, whirling helix. This series required Verdier to adapt her studio environment, incorporating a mobile platform to allow new, fluid expressions from the centre of the canvas, and was exhibited at Waddington Custot, London that same year. In 2022, Verdier had a solo show at the Musée Camille Claudel, ‘Alchimie d'un vitrail’, which featured a series of stained-glass windows created in collaboration with master glassmaker Flavie Serrière Vincent-Petit. Other recent solo exhibitions include ‘Le Chant des Étoiles’ at Musée Unterlinden, Colmar (2022); ‘Im Auge des Kosmo’s at Saarlandmuseum-Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken (2022); ‘La Mouvance de la Matière’ at Château Lynch-Bages, Pauillac (2023); and ‘Retables’ at Waddington Custot, London and Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris (2024). In her Retables series, Verdier breaks from the conventional canvas format and adopts the structure of a winged altarpiece, reimagining it outside of a religious context. No longer connected to any liturgical function, Verdier’s Retables illuminate the motifs and themes of her previous paintings. In 2025, Verdier had two solo exhibitions: ‘Mute’ at the Cité de l’architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris, and ‘Poétique de la ligne’ at the Domaine de Chaumont-Sur-Loire, Chaumont-sur-Loire.

Verdier’s work is part of major collections, including the Collection Pinault (Paris and Venice); Fondation Hubert Looser (Zurich); Musée Unterlinden (Colmar, France); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou (Paris); Musée Granet (Aix-en-Provence, France); Musée Camille Claudel (Nogent-Sur-Seine, France); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (Dijon, France); Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo); Palais de l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris)’; Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich); Saarland Museum, Modern Gallery (Saarbrücken, Germany); Sigg Collection ( Mauensee, Switzerland) and The Juilliard School (New York).

Fabienne Verdier lives and works in France.