Germaine Richier

Germaine Richier was born on September 16, 1902, in Grans, France. She was an avant-garde sculptor and printmaker of provocative biomorphic figures. Richier studied art in Montpellier, went to Paris in 1926 and learned to work with bronze. Her talent was recognized with a solo exhibition in 1934 at the Galerie Max Kaganovitch, the Blumenthal Prize for Sculpture in 1936 and an exhibition her work at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. By the 1940s, her figures had become allegorical and sometimes hybridized expressions of humanity and nature. A fascination with insect forms and night creatures is exemplified by her Praying Mantis in 1946. Richier worked also in ceramics, mosaic and printmaking and illustrated Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1951 aof nd Contre terre in 1958, a volume of poems by her husband, René de Solier. Richier’s contribution to the art world was cut short by her early death from cancer in 1959. However, her oeuvre was resurrected in 2014 in an exhibition of nearly 50 of her works at the Dominique Lévy Gallery and Galerie Perrotin in New York City as well as in a retrospective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland.