Nicolas de Staël

Presenting more than two hundred paintings, drawings, engravings and notebooks from public and private collections, this retrospective, organized chronologically, takes a new look at Staël’s work, trying to stay as close as possible to his graphic and pictorial research. . Far from the myth, it is a question of showing the artist at work, fascinated by the spectacle of the world – whether he is confronted with a landscape, a football match, a ballet or a fruit placed on a table.
Carrying out several canvases at the same time, Staël works for many months, before condensing his research into one or more manifesto paintings. In this experimental approach, drawing plays a leading role, as does the desire to explore new formats, mediums and tools. From his dark, material canvases of the 1940s to his luminous paintings painted before his premature death in 1955, Staël’s work deliberately overturns the distinction between abstraction and figuration, in the passionate pursuit of an art that is ever denser and more concise.