Alexis Lartigue Fine Art

Alexis Lartigue Fine Art Post War & Modern Art
Georges Mathieu - Hartung - Sam Francis - Poliakoff - Calder - Vasarely - Soulages- César - Venet...

Throwback to Art Paris with Takashi Murakami 🌼
15/06/2026

Throwback to Art Paris with Takashi Murakami 🌼

In 1980, Yayoi Kusama had been living for three years at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, where she had...
10/06/2026

In 1980, Yayoi Kusama had been living for three years at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, where she had voluntarily taken up residence in 1977 after returning to Japan, a move that rekindled the crises and hallucinations that had accompanied her since childhood. Butterfly was created during this period of personal and artistic reorganization. Far removed from the spectacular environments that defined her New York years, the work reflects a return to more modest formats and an especially sustained drawing practice. The sheet becomes a space of condensation in which the artist continues, on a reduced scale, her exploration of living forms and the logics of proliferation that have structured her imagination since the 1950s.

The symmetry of the subject, the butterfly, appears here unstable. Pink and yellow washes slightly overflow their contours, while the blue-grey body seems subtly displaced from the central axis. The black dots, arranged rhythmically across the wings, accompany the development of the form. In this encounter between the organic and the serial, between the fluidity of watercolor and the rigor of the repetitive motif, Butterfly reveals one of the enduring constants of Kusama’s practice: the search for an always precarious balance between chaotic expansion and the principle of order.

Butterfly, 1980
Felt-tip pen on paper
Signed, dated, and stamped with the artist’s seal
9,6 × 10,7 in

31/05/2026

In 1953, Hartung is in the midst of a series of pastels begun in 1948 that will eventually yield nearly two hundred sheets, each serving as a matrix for his paintings. The medium suits him: its ductility allows curves and straight lines, reversals of direction, to follow one another in a single unbroken movement. Against this ochre and brown ground, worked in gradations, several black marks surge across the surface along trajectories nothing fully premeditated.

One might be tempted to read these jets as writing, their gestural quality evoking the trace of an ideogram. Hartung resisted the comparison: unlike some of his contemporaries, he never acknowledged any influence from Oriental calligraphy, his mark being more forceful, more physical, its meaning immanent to the gesture. What he called the urge to « leave the trace of my gesture, to scratch, to scrape » designates a purely bodily economy, where the act precedes the intention. Jennifer Mundy cites Hartung speaking of an « alchemical law » capable of « transmuting apparent disorder into perfect movement » (Works on Paper 1922–56, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1996), a formulation that captures the constitutive ambivalence of his practice.

Hans Hartung (1904–1989)
Untitled, 1953
Pastel and chacoral on paper
48.3 x 72 cm

What Anna-Eva Bergman noted in her sketchbooks (that « archaic beginning » she perceived equally in the escarpments of F...
17/05/2026

What Anna-Eva Bergman noted in her sketchbooks (that « archaic beginning » she perceived equally in the escarpments of Finnmark and the ruins of Berlin) says something essential about the nature of her painting: a metaphysical conception of landscape, as the art historian Annie Claustres put it, that stands deliberately outside the linear history of the avant-gardes. A body of work built on the margins, sometimes overshadowed by Hartung, whose singularity is long overdue its place.

It was at Calais railway station, captivated by what he described as “a jungle of iron” (rails, tunnels, multicoloured s...
11/05/2026

It was at Calais railway station, captivated by what he described as “a jungle of iron” (rails, tunnels, multicoloured signals) that Takis conceived, in 1955, the first sculptures of the Signals series. Signal A dates from 1970, fifteen years after this formative revelation, at a moment when Takis had just returned from a residency at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where, from 1968 onward, he had pursued research into electromagnetic forces. Three painted steel rods of unequal height rise from a black metal base articulated in staggered platforms; at the summit of each rests a stone collected in Greece (irregular, oxidised fragments with flaking surfaces) held aloft in a state of constitutive precariousness, the attenuated line of the steel set against the rough density of the rock.

The title articulates precisely what the sculpture performs: it captures, in the physical sense of the term, oscillating and quivering with the slightest variation in its surroundings, registering energies that elude ordinary vision. The rod derives its morphology from the infrastructures of transmission produced by the twentieth century (antennae, masts, telegraph poles) yet the Greek stone placed at its summit radically alters the regime of this emission. What Takis seeks within matter are states of tension that sculpture renders perceptible without ever resolving: the rod trembles at the faintest current of air, bends beneath the burden it carries without yielding, and it is this delicately sustained equilibrium that constitutes the work’s force - a Pascalian reed raised from the very materials of technological modernity.

Takis
Signal A, 1970
Painted steel and stone
120 × 23 cm

06/05/2026

In 1960, with the Mariales and Manteaux de la Vierge, Hantaï adopted folding as method, a process he would develop exclusively until 1982 across eight successive series, each corresponding to a distinct manner of folding the canvas. The surface here is entirely saturated: grey-greens and slate blacks compressed into a dense, cracked relief, the paint thickening at the ridges and hollowing at the creases, with islands of deep blue surfacing across the field.

The series draws on the Marian iconography he had encountered in Italy, above all the intense blue-black mantle of Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna, discovered in Florence in 1948.

This canvas was painted at the Higashi-Ginza studio in Tokyo, where Francis worked regularly throughout the early 1960s....
30/04/2026

This canvas was painted at the Higashi-Ginza studio in Tokyo, where Francis worked regularly throughout the early 1960s. From his first exhibitions in the city, critics had linked his treatment of negative space with the Japanese concept of ma. The term resists mechanical translation: neither simple void nor simple interval, ma designates the space between things as the very condition of their relationship, what, in the lineage of Nishida Kitarō’s logic of place, makes the individual what it is solely through confrontation with another individual, absolute nothingness becoming the very foundation of relational structure.

A massive arc of ultramarine runs along the left edge, the paint applied thickly, nearly opaque at the top, dissolving into irregular splashes and droplets as it descends; to the upper right, a yellow arc, cut by the canvas edge, surfaces as a fragment. The two forms occupy distinct registers, without a shared axis: they correspond obliquely across the pale expanse of the center, so that this expanse ceases to be a ground and becomes the active medium in which their relationship takes hold, the interval acquiring its charge precisely from being delimited without being closed, the white surface functioning as the place where the two chromatic masses continue to act upon each other without meeting.

Sam Francis,
Untitled, 1962–64
Acrylic on canvas,
91 × 61 cm

17/04/2026

1973: Alexander Calder is 75 years old and his exhibition schedule reflects an undiminished activity. It is also the year when Flamingo is installed on the Federal Center Plaza in Chicago, red and monumental, seven and a half meters of welded steel set against the towers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This context of large-scale public commissions presides over the creation of this gouache: it is a preparatory study for a stabile, the moment when the idea takes form before steel renders it definitive.

The term “stabile” was coined by Jean Arp in 1932 to distinguish these static, self-supporting sculptures from the suspended mobiles that had made Calder famous. The dialectic between the two forms runs through his entire body of work. Gouache, a more immediate medium than sculpture, which Calder had practiced since the 1920s and intensified from 1952 onward, allowed him to capture what studio fabrication could not: the first intuition, the formal impulse prior to the constraint of material. Simple geometric forms (circles, triangles, trapezoids) are outlined in black with a brush, defining flat areas with the precision of a stencil, while the palette is reduced to pure primaries, to which Calder remained faithful throughout his life. A fidelity not without its own history: in 1922, at the age of 24, lying on a coil of rope aboard a boat he was repainting off the coast of Guatemala, he witnessed simultaneously “the beginning of a red sun on one side of the horizon and the moon, like a silver coin, descending on the other,” and these two colors, he said, determined his vocation.

The one and the others, 1973
Gouache on paper
74 × 110 cm.

Thank you to everyone who visited us at this year!
14/04/2026

Thank you to everyone who visited us at this year!

Art Paris 2026 () with Bernar Venet ()Booth F7
10/04/2026

Art Paris 2026 () with Bernar Venet ()

Booth F7

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