Barré

Born in Nantes in 1924, Martin Barré settled in Paris in the early 1950s and began exhibiting in the middle of the decade. From 1954 onwards, he gradually moved away from figuration towards a highly distinctive form of abstraction, independent of both Art Informel and geometric abstraction.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Barré progressively reduced painting to a few essential elements: the line, the white of the canvas, and the space between them. In 1960, his exploration of the line reached a radical form in works such as 60-T-45, a four-panel painting in which a continuous line extends across the separate canvases, applied directly from the tube. In 1961, he introduced his celebrated “lasso” paintings.

From 1963 onwards, and more prominently from 1967, Barré incorporated spray paint into his practice, developing the “Zèbres” series and his stencil-based works. This early use of spray paint remains one of the most innovative aspects of his practice. During the 1970s, he continued to explore concealment, the white ground and the grid, before returning in the 1980s to increasingly geometric and chromatic compositions.

Barré gained early recognition in the United States, where several of his paintings entered museum collections from the late 1950s onwards, while his first acquisition by a French public collection came only about a decade later.

Barré’s work was the subject of a major retrospective in Nantes, Tourcoing and Nice in 1989. In 1993, the year of his death in Paris, the Jeu de Paume presented an exhibition devoted to his work of the 1980s. His paintings are held in major public and private collections internationally, including the Centre Pompidou, which holds around twenty works. Major retrospectives followed at MAMCO Geneva in 2019–2020 and at the Centre Pompidou in 2020–2021.

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