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Lot Essay
An ethereal, monumental vision stretching almost two-and-a-half metres in width, Les Madones (The Madonnas) is a lyrical example of Claire Tabouret’s distinctive figurative language. From mottled, hallucinogenic layers of paint, a group of young women emerges, bathed in faded, otherworldly light. Clad in bright dresses, with long hair cascading to the floor, they are seemingly caught off guard, their eyes trained on different points in the distance. Painted in 2014, the year before Tabouret moved from her native France to Los Angeles, the work captures her fascination with group portraits: a format through which she explores themes relating to childhood, youth and identity. Laden with echoes of art history—from Edvard Munch and Edouard Manet to nineteenth-century photography—its composition is closely related to her landmark series Les débutantes from the same period, which similarly confronts the subtle social dynamics between young girls on the brink of adulthood. In Les Madones, as in those works, the viewer is encouraged to contemplate the friction between the characters’ individual and collective identities, and the forces that bind them together in that single moment.
Coming to prominence in the early 2010s, Tabouret has risen to critical acclaim over the past decade, notably exhibiting alongside Yoko Ono at the Villa Médicis, Rome, in 2017, and subsequently mounting solo presentations at institutions including the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, last year. Her work is currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, as part of the launch of its new Scantland Collection, featuring alongside artists including Julie Curtiss, Hilary Pecis and Emily Mae Smith. Part of a generation of painters who have reinvigorated portraiture during the new millennium, Tabouret draws upon a variety of sources, including old photographs, the internet, magazines and the pages of art history books. Her subjects are illusory figments whose existence begins and ends with the painted surface: at any moment, it seems, they might disappear into its depths. ‘I don’t know anything about them’, she explains. ‘… I don’t what happened just before, I don’t know what happened just after this moment, and all that is what will be created in the painting in a way’ (C. Tabouret, quoted in video for Claire Tabouret: Siblings at Perrotin Seoul, 2020).
Les Madones bears witness to this approach. Suspended in a strange, twilit universe, the women’s stories are only half-told, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. While its composition is riddled with echoes of past paintings—from the Madonnas of the Renaissance, to Paul Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses (1898-1905) and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) —the work ultimately derives its magic from Tabouret’s near-abstract application of paint, which seems to unmoor her subjects from any concrete references. The artist vividly recalls seeing Claude Monet’s Nymphéas in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, as a child, and would continue to be inspired by the paintings’ luminous depictions of water. In the present work, her subjects seem to float upon the surface like liquid reflections, backlit by a shifting, intangible glow. ‘Because the light comes from underneath,’ she explains, ‘you cannot really turn it off’ (C. Tabouret, quoted in J. Zara, ‘Claire Tabouret’s Art Triumphs with Subtle Feminism’, Galerie Magazine, 8 August 2017).
Coming to prominence in the early 2010s, Tabouret has risen to critical acclaim over the past decade, notably exhibiting alongside Yoko Ono at the Villa Médicis, Rome, in 2017, and subsequently mounting solo presentations at institutions including the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, last year. Her work is currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, as part of the launch of its new Scantland Collection, featuring alongside artists including Julie Curtiss, Hilary Pecis and Emily Mae Smith. Part of a generation of painters who have reinvigorated portraiture during the new millennium, Tabouret draws upon a variety of sources, including old photographs, the internet, magazines and the pages of art history books. Her subjects are illusory figments whose existence begins and ends with the painted surface: at any moment, it seems, they might disappear into its depths. ‘I don’t know anything about them’, she explains. ‘… I don’t what happened just before, I don’t know what happened just after this moment, and all that is what will be created in the painting in a way’ (C. Tabouret, quoted in video for Claire Tabouret: Siblings at Perrotin Seoul, 2020).
Les Madones bears witness to this approach. Suspended in a strange, twilit universe, the women’s stories are only half-told, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. While its composition is riddled with echoes of past paintings—from the Madonnas of the Renaissance, to Paul Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses (1898-1905) and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) —the work ultimately derives its magic from Tabouret’s near-abstract application of paint, which seems to unmoor her subjects from any concrete references. The artist vividly recalls seeing Claude Monet’s Nymphéas in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, as a child, and would continue to be inspired by the paintings’ luminous depictions of water. In the present work, her subjects seem to float upon the surface like liquid reflections, backlit by a shifting, intangible glow. ‘Because the light comes from underneath,’ she explains, ‘you cannot really turn it off’ (C. Tabouret, quoted in J. Zara, ‘Claire Tabouret’s Art Triumphs with Subtle Feminism’, Galerie Magazine, 8 August 2017).