Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu (1921 - 2012) was a French painter and theorist who played an important role in the Lyrical Abstraction and Informalism art movements in the 1940s and 1950s. Mathieu...
Georges Mathieu (1921 - 2012) was a French painter and theorist who played an important role in the Lyrical Abstraction and Informalism art movements in the 1940s and 1950s. Mathieu prioritized the primacy of speed, denial of references, and the ecstatic state in the creation of his paintings. His work had a distinct rhythmic and calligraphic quality which he created by using long brushes and applying paint directly onto the canvas from the tubes. The nature of Mathieu’s work led him to perform in public and on live television where he would create his quick paintings on camera. The rapid execution and movement to Mathieu’s paintings guaranteed uninhibited freedom unseen in other works of his time. Mathieu’s work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and is in more than eighty museums and public permanent collections around the world such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.