The Review
What you may not know about Fabienne Verdier

« It is no longer truly I who guides the painting; it is the painting that tells me what it has to say. »
— Fabienne Verdier

Born in Paris in 1962, Fabienne Verdier embodies a rare synthesis of East and West. Trained first at the Fine Arts School of Toulouse, she left at a young age for China, where she spent nearly ten years, from 1983 to 1992, at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. She was one of the few European women admitted to a traditional Chinese art curriculum, immersing herself deeply in the calligraphic and pictorial culture of her masters. This formative experience has left an indelible mark on her practice: her work unfolds at the crossroads of two worlds, between rigor and spontaneity, silence and energy, meditation and intensity. She was taught the art of thinking in motion.


Fabienne Verdier (Born 1962)
Intention I Esprit intuitif, 2004
Oil and ink on linen-cotton canvas mounted on panel, signed, titled, dated, and located L’ermitage, Autumn 2004, and annotated Xin Cœur-Esprit Intuitif, Grey Monochrome on the reverse; vertical monochrome diptych
135 x 160 cm – 53 1/8 x 63 in. Executed in 2004

PROVENANCE
Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne
Estimate: €60,000 – €80,000

Her journey to China inspired a book, Passagère du silence (Albin Michel, 2003), in which she recounts these ten years of initiation. This travelogue and personal narrative bear witness to the emergence of a work nourished by patience, discipline, and the pursuit of an inner breath.

Fabienne Verdier’s work extends beyond the dialogue between two pictorial traditions. It resonates with music, poetry, science, and language. In 2014, she established her studio at the Juilliard School in New York, where she founded a research laboratory exploring the interactions between sound waves and pictorial vibrations—a first in the institution’s history.

To achieve her singular pictorial language, Fabienne Verdier devised her own tools: large brushes made of animal hair, sometimes suspended from the ceiling, which respond to the weight of the gesture and engage the movement of the entire body. In 2009, she evolved this research by inventing a nozzle filled with acrylic medium, allowing her to walk on the canvas and project the paint directly. These experiments, which she calls walking paintings, express her desire to unite gravity, rhythm, and trace in a single gesture. Her studio becomes a space of dance and gravity, where the material seems to dictate its own law. She often speaks of an approach in which the brush is no longer an extension of the hand but a suspended instrument, balanced between control and letting go.


Fabienne Verdier (Born 1962)
Maturare n°1, 2005
The Spirit of the Mountains – Intimate Studies series
Chinese ink on Chinese paper, signed, titled, dated, and located L’Atelier, Autumn 2005 along the left side
45 x 67 cm – 17 3/4 x 26 3/8 in.
Estimate: €8,000 – €12,000

Her monumental canvases, often monochrome or bichrome, are instantly recognizable. The broad, singular gesture captures the passage of energy across the surface. Ink and pigments intertwine in a tension between control and release, giving rise to compositions of striking rhythmic balance. The Chinese aesthetic of qi (breath) merges here with the gestural physicality of the great Western Expressionists.
Her work is not limited to monumental scale: Fabienne Verdier also creates smaller ink works, particularly from her Spirit of the Mountains series. In doing so, she expresses herself both on the infinitely large and the infinitely small, seeking to capture correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Curious about all sources of inspiration, she also explores the light of Flemish masters such as Van Eyck, translating their chromatic densities into her abstract language. At the same time, she has always maintained precious notebooks throughout her creative process, intertwining sketches, works of art, reflections, and poetic notations: an intimate laboratory where thought is formed before the gesture.
Her research has led to several prestigious commissions. In 2010, she created two frescoes for the Palazzo Torlonia in Rome, and in 2013, a 12 x 8-meter installation for the Tour Majunga in La Défense. In 2018, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Petit Robert, the artist produced 22 original works, some of which were featured on the covers of the famous dictionary.


Fabienne Verdier (Born 1962)
Le Méandre. Homage to Van Eyck.
Labyrinthine Thought, Autumn 2011
Ink, pigments, and varnish on canvas mounted on panel, signed, titled, located, and dated L’Atelier, Autumn 2011
Horizontal diptych, bichrome yellow and green
183 x 241 cm – 72 1/16 x 94 7/8 in.
Executed in 2011

PROVENANCE
Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris
Estimate: €90,000 – €150,000

The Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence dedicated her first retrospective exhibition, bringing together both preparatory drawings and around fifty monumental canvases inspired by the forms, lines, and light of the Bibémus quarries, Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Cézanne’s landscapes.

The artist continues an international career marked by major exhibitions. In 2023, the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar devoted an exhibition to her work focused on the representation of death, which she associated with the cycle of the stars and the transformation of matter. In October 2025, she will take over the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine with the exhibition Mute, which will feature around forty paintings spanning thirty years of creation.

For Fabienne Verdier, painting is not an object but a living experience—a passage of breath, a dialogue between the hand, the material, and the invisible.

Upcoming Auction
Post-war & Contemporary Art
Wednesday, November 19, 2025

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Department Director and Expert
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