Custot Gallery Dubai is pleased to present Voyage d’hiver, a remarkable series of paintings by the celebrated contemporary abstract painter, Fabienne Verdier.

Fabienne Verdier imagined this series of 8 paintings in 2016 while thinking of ‘Die Winterreise’ (Voyage d’hiver) by classical Austrian composer Franz Schubert. This ensemble of 24 lieder written for piano and voice in 1827, one year before the death of Schubert, bring to the artist, in each listen, immense vibrations.

For the very first time, Fabienne Verdier has superposed, on canvas, strokes of energy upon each other resulting in a fading notion of scale. Every movement or countermovement of the material can slowly evoke the magnificent sensation that perceives the hiker when he does not know anymore, in his wanders, if he is the one moving or if the scenery is shifting ahead of him.

As Fabienne Verdier describes:

“I can’t help myself, while listening to the internal dialogue between the poet and the piano, to think of the mysterious and captivating painting of Caspar David Friedrich, painted in 1818, ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’.
We can perceive in the melodies of Schubert a journey which intertwines, juxtaposes, tangles, and interlaces horizons, shingles, pathways, undergrowth, hills, valleys, and interior landscapes. In face of the sea or of the desert the traveler lets himself be carried away by the wind that sculpts the movement of the waves and the dunes, in infinite transformations.”

About Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier (b. 1962, Paris, France) is an abstract painter who explores the dynamism of forces in nature, movement and immobility by drawing on her intimate knowledge of techniques and traditions of both Western and Eastern art. Verdier paints vertically, standing directly on her stretchers, using giant brushes and tools of her own invention suspended from the studio ceiling. Her work combines Eastern aspects of unity, spontaneity and asceticism with the line, action and expression of Western painting.

As a young art school graduate, Verdier left France for China in 1985 to study the art of spontaneous painting and other Eastern traditions with some of the last great Chinese painters who survived the Cultural Revolution. Her adventure and immersion as an apprentice painter would last nearly ten years, recounted in her 2003 book, ‘Passagère du Silence’.

Verdier’s work has been exhibited extensively in Beijing, Singapore, Taipei, Paris, Rome, Lausanne, Zurich and Brussels, among other cities. In 2011, she was included in an important group exhibition The Art of Deceleration, from Caspar David Friedrich to Ai Wei Wei at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany. In 2012, the Hubert Looser Foundation of Zurich, having previously commissioned several works, selected Verdier for a group exhibition with Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly in Vienna’s Kunstforum. In 2013 the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, Belgium, held an important solo exhibition of Verdier’s work in conversation with Flemish Primitives such as Van Eyck and Memling. In 2014, she was invited to create an installation of seven works for Köningsklasse II, organized by the Pinakotek der Moderne of Munich, and participated in Formes Simples at Centre Pompidou-Metz in France. In addition to her current painterly research into possible links between music and painting, recent projects include Verdier’s conceptual collaboration with architect Jean Nouvel for the National Art Museum of China project in Beijing. In 2016, seven of Verdier’s works were acquired by Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Verdier was invited to compose a visual partita for the 2017 edition of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and won the commission to design that year's Roland Garros French Open official poster. In 2018, the artist set up a nomadic studio on Sainte-Victoire Mountain, renowned for its presence in several paintings by Paul Cézanne. The resulting series was exhibited alongside the works of Cézanne at Verdier’s retrospective exhibition at Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, 2019.

In 2022, she is set to participate in two major exhibitions in France, at the Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent-sur-Seine, as well as at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar.