Alain Clément

21S1G-2021 (Abstract print)

2021

Alain Clément is a French abstract painter whose works grow out of a lifelong exploration of color, lines, curves, physicality and space.

Clément taught at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier from 1970 until 1977. He began teaching at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes in 1977, and was headmaster of the school from 1985 until 1990. He lives and works in Nîmes. Clément studied drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, an art school in the Montparnasse district of Paris and learned engraving and printmaking at Atelier 17, an influential print workshop founded in Paris by Stanley William Hayter, a British Surrealist.

Clément has exhibited extensively, and his works are collected by several international public institutions, including Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, France; the Museum of Art and History, Neuchâtel, Switzerland; the Kunst Museum, Düsseldorf, Germany, and many others.

Clément’s practice is rooted in an exploration of color — sometimes color as volume, sometimes color as a lyrical expression of gesture, sometimes color as a graphic presence — always color as an element that is endowed with multiple meanings. His work fluctuates between painting and sculpture, a back and forth that both results from, and contributes to, an ongoing exchange of ideas.

The medium of painting offers Clément an arena in which gestural freedom, physicality, experimentation and immediacy can lead to the development of curved, graphic expressions of color and line, which may then be simplified and extended further into space as sculptural forms. Whether they manifest on a two-dimensional plane in a free and physical way, like a dance, or as a three-dimensional volume, intricately planned, his compositions can be understood in terms of the visual relationships they express between color and space.

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