Rainbows - Fabienne Verdier

The Maison Rousseau et Littérature is hosting a selection of paintings from the exhibition Le chant des étoiles, presented from October 2022 to March 2023 by the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. Forgoing the traditional representations of Western art history, Fabienne Verdier proposes a new iconography inspired by physics and astrophysics research into stellar formation and evolution. Depicting the aura of light produced when a star dies, to which she compares our own end of life, she approaches the representation of death as an energy transmitted to the living.
The altarpiece
Her exhibition extended from the medieval cloister of the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar to the new wing and nave designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron. The exhibition took an original approach to Fabienne Verdier's work, comparing it with the museum's masterpieces, including the Issenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516) by the two great German masters of the late Gothic period, Matthias Grünewald (for the painted panels) and Nicolas de Haguenau (for the sculpted part). This polyptych, made up of painted panels and a sculpted case, depicts episodes from the life of Christ and Saint Anthony. It was commissioned by Guy Guers, then preceptor of the Antonine order at Issenheim, to adorn the high altar of the convent church and comfort the patients suffering from ergotism, a veritable scourge in the Middle Ages, and treated by the Antonines.
Rainbows
Fabienne Verdier, herself in the throes of creation during the 2020 pandemic, spent over two years painting a monumental series of seventy-six canvases - the Rainbows - based on the Resurrection panel in the Issenheim Altarpiece. Particularly influenced by the transfigured, gushing depiction of Christ emerging from the tomb haloed in light, radiating out into the darkness of the starlit night, the painter conceives her paintings, like Grünewald's, as a meditation on light and colour.
Fabienne Verdier
Born in Paris in 1962, Fabienne Verdier began her studies at the Toulouse School of Fine Arts in 1979. At the age of twenty, she left for China to study with the last great masters of traditional painting. Suffering from a serious illness, she returned to Europe at the age of thirty and in 2003 published the autobiographical novel Passagère du silence, ten years of initiation in China. Fabienne Verdier abandoned easel painting and imagined a new way of painting vertically, in which the force of gravity became central. In 2006, she designed monumental brushes with which she became one with her paintings on the floor. From 2009 to 2013, she confronted the paintings of Flemish primitives for an exhibition with the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. In 2019, she will have a major retrospective at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence. Her work can be found in numerous private and public collections around the world.