James Coignard

Trois bleus en diagonale.

2005

Pastel, gouache and coffee on paper. Artwork size: 58 x 56 cm. Frame size: 78 x 76 cm. Free shipment worldwide. Acquired directly from the artist. Archive number (P90/37) “The heart is an eye,” writes Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in an essay on Matta’s paintings. Matta creates a world coloured both by a sunny faith in the future and by visions of impending doom. Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Antonio Matta, who died aged 91 on 23 November 2002, was born in Santiago, Chile, on 11 November 1911 into a family with Spanish, French and Basque roots, and raised in an atmosphere of religiosity. By the age of 21 he had graduated and begun work as an architect, but his leisure time he devoted to sketching and painting. In 1933 he travelled to Europe for the first time, visiting Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy and other countries, and subsequently taking the initiative to collaborate with the architect, Le Corbusier. As time passed, however, Matta’s enthusiasm for a career in architecture waned, and he began to devote himself full-time to art, making early acquaintances with surrealists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, André Breton and others. Between 1939 and 1948 Matta, like many of his artistic contemporaries, lived in self-imposed exile in the USA, but, after almost 10 years’ absence from Europe, he returned to make first Rome and then, a few years later, Paris his home. Throughout most of the rest of his life Matta commuted between his studio in Paris and his creative refuge in the monastery outside Rome. And it is here, in Italy, that he produced his greatest paintings. Matta’s first retrospective in Sweden was organised in 1956 when his works were exhibited in what was then Galerie Colibri – run by, among others, the artist C O Hultén at number 36 Södra Förstadsgatan in Malmö, Sweden. This was also the time when Matta began to collaborate with poets and other artists in Sweden. He produced the illustrations for Lasse Söderberg’s first anthology of poems, Akrobaterna (“The Acrobats”), published in 1955, and was also responsible for the cover of the Swedish art and literary magazine Salamander. In 1959 the first museum exhibition of Matta’s work in Europe was arranged at the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna Museet) in Stockholm. Held under the aegis of Pontus Hultén, it was entitled “Fifteen Forms of Doubt” and included 15 or so gigantic paintings...

Published by edition GKM. Unframed. Edition: 40 ex. Signed by the artist. Free shipment worldwide. “With just a few strokes of his brush he conjures up an entire world. James Coignard extends the boundaries between concrete and abstract. He knows how to create chromatic melodies that shift in timbre from cobalt blue to blood red. His pictures are an artistic epicentre where lines, letters and numbers meld with vigorous swashes of colour.” That is how the writer Johan Persson has described the artist’s paintings. With this exhibition we honour James Coignard, showing some of his last carborundum engravings and paintings as well as presenting the book “L’œuvre gravé de James Coignard” volume VI. In this edition, we have gathered together all the engravings that James Coignard produced between June 2005 and his decease, on 7 March 2008. Behind him he left many fond memories and a life’s work as a great artist. James Coignard’s principal modes of expression were oil on canvas and gravure au carborundum, but also in bronze and glass sculptures as well as in ceramics. His work has been shown on more than 400 exhibitions, primarily in Central Europe and Scandinavia, but also in Canada and the USA. His first Swedish exhibition was at Malmö Museum in 1956. The early 1970s saw the start of a long-term liaison with Galleri Östermalm in Stockholm, owned by Editions Sonet. They came to represent him in Scandinavia and edited several volumes of his graphic works. It was not until 2003 that we at Galleri GKM Siwert Bergström...