MARTIN BARRÉ
By isolating a painting’s basic components — line, surface, gesture, color — Martin Barré produced a body of work that is unique in the history of abstract painting. At the beginning of his career in mid-century Paris, Barré abandoned gestural expressionism and replaced it with his own systems-based compositional methods. As he later said of his paintings, “Seriality is the means of producing them. It is not so much the paintings that make the series as the series that produce the paintings.” His pioneering approach went on to anticipate and influence some of today’s most innovative painting.
This catalogue, which accompanies the largest exhibition of the artist’s work ever held in the United States, features color plates of twenty-seven paintings spanning more than thirty years. It also includes an essay by Alex Bacon and photographs of Barré’s Paris studio taken in 1993 by David Seidner.