Gérard Schneider

About

A leading figure of post-war European painting, Schneider came to embody the Lyrical Abstraction movement that emerged in Paris during the 1950s. This group of artists, which included Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Georges Mathieu, redefined painterly abstraction as a radical new means of personal expression, free from any reference to nature or the outside world. In place of rigid formalism, their art embraced lyricism, spontaneity and exuberant combinations of pure colour to express inner emotional states. Schneider and his peers played a crucial role in establishing a new pictorial language predicated on the evocative power of gesture, one that paralleled the early development of Abstract Expressionism in New York.

Featuring works created between 1956 and 1981, this exhibition traces the evolution of Schneider’s formal vocabulary through the post-war years. The paintings on show demonstrate the artist’s tireless conviction in the poetics of abstraction, as well as the gradual adoption of a looser, more essential visual language influenced by Japanese calligraphy.