Gérard Fromanger

Born in 1939 in Pontchartrain (France), he died on 18 June 2021 in Paris.

Gérard Fromanger's work is part of a vibrant, profound and multicoloured reflection on the fluctuations of the world and the history of art. A disciple of César, a friend of Prévert and the Giacometti brothers, an accomplice of Godard, Foucault and Deleuze, he makes these links with the intellectual and artistic scene a driving force in his work. In the 1960s, he was one of the protagonists of Figuration Narrative alongside Erro, Klasen, Monory, Rancillac, Télémaque and others. In May 1968, red dominated his palette. With Godard, he made film-tracts and with Arroyo, Rancillac and others, he founded the Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts which produced thousands of posters all over Paris. From the 1970s onwards, the industrialisation of France under Georges Pompidou, the emerging capitalist imperialism and the emergence of a society of information and mass communication offered new subjects to his militant pictorial practice. Proceeding in series, each work of the artist calls for another. A work which, beyond the frequent mutations, affirms its permanence: a painting open to the world and at the same time fully conscious of itself. Over the decades, his "figurative and conceptual" art, as some art critics like to define it, has lost none of its strength or its freshness, between stylized figures and flat colours. 

Le Printemps de septembre is showing De toutes les couleurs, peinture d'Histoire, 1991/1992, a monumental oil on canvas.

From 1964, Gérard Fromanger took part in group exhibitions (Salon de Mai, Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Salon Grands et Jeunes d'Aujourd'hui, etc.) in which he won several important prizes. Some thirty retrospectives have been devoted to him around the world, notably in 2016 at Centre Pompidou and in 2012 at Fondation Leclerc in Landerneau, and more than a hundred works have entered public and private collections.