“I approach each picture hoping for a color. Everything revolves around the appearance of that color.”
Alain Clément, 1989
The French painter and sculptor Alain Clément (b. 1941) is influenced by the shimmering interplay of the light and color of the nature of his hometown of Nîmes, where, in addition to Paris and Berlin, he lives and works. Clément, the former director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, strives to merge color and light into a single, indissoluble unity in his paintings, the subtle transparency and brilliance of which are both charismatic and captivating. To achieve a harmonization of forms in his work, Clément employs both strict, geometrical elements as well as broad, curved bands of color that seem to glide across the pictorial surface.
As a young self-taught artist at the end of the 1960s, his work was characterized by the figurative, but after over five decades of seeing, learning, experience, and intellectual examination he has arrived at abstraction. In 1998, the artist finally transposed his painterly philosophy into spatial form and created his first sculpture. Since then, his largely monochrome, color-intensive steel reliefs and sculptures have stood in close dialog with his paintings and gouaches.
In this, our first exhibition of the Alain Clément at DIE GALERIE, we present approximately 50 works executed between 1997 and 2014 by an artist long viewed as a player of notable importance by the international art world, and whose work can be found in museums of the caliber of the Centre Pompidou as well as in notable collections like those of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Bremen Kunsthalle.
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