AURELIE NEMOURS (Paris, 1910-2005). Untitled.... Lot 43

AURELIE NEMOURS (Paris, 1910-2005). Untitled. 1999. Painting on metal plate (in six pieces), copy 30/30. Hand-signed on the back; numbering and date inscribed on the back of each of the six pieces. Size: 15 x 12 cm. each (x 6). Aurelie Nemours managed to make a well-deserved name for herself within the abstract-geometric movement that developed in the 1960s, heir to the interwar avant-garde, especially neo-plasticism. Here we show a reconfigurable piece based on six squares that form a grid in primary and secondary colours. Orthogonality, flat, bright colours and a desire to avoid interpretation defined her work. Aurelie Nemours was an important abstract painter belonging to the Constructive Art movement. In 1941, she attended André Lhote's studio. After the war, she attended the studio of Fernand Léger, who had reopened his studio in Paris. He began to exhibit at salons in 1944, then in 1949 at the Salon des Réalités nouvelles in Paris, where Auguste Herbin was exhibiting. In 1955, a Parisian publisher printed his first collection of poems "Midi la lune", embellished with his own woodcuts, which received a favourable review. At that time he had begun to work with pastels and created this exceptional series of black and white works, full of contrasts, with compositions strictly based on orthogonality, which he entitled Les Demeures (The Mansions) in reference to the writings of St. Teresa of Avila. In 1953, Gallery Colette Allendy organised Nemours' first solo exhibition in Paris. In 1957, Aurelie Nemours took part in the activities of the Groupe Espace. In 1960 she took part in the exhibition organised by Gallery Denise René in New York and presented at Gallery Chalette, "Construction and Geometry in Painting from Malevitch to Tomorrow", which consecrated her belonging to the current of Geometric Abstract Art. In 1998 he received a public commission for the stained glass windows of the church of the Priory of Notre-Dame de Salagon in Haute-Provence. In 1994, he received the Grand Prix national de peinture in France, although he had stopped painting since 1992, due to macular degeneration affecting his eyes. In 1996, the Grenoble Museum organised an exhibition in homage to Nemours. Two major retrospectives followed, one in Valencia organised in 1998 at the IVAM, the other at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes the following year. In 2001 she exhibited at the Musée de la Cohue in Vannes. It was not until 2004, when Aurelie Nemours was 94 years old and almost blind, that the Centre Georges Pompidou devoted a retrospective exhibition to her, with 170 works and a major published catalogue, an exhibition which received 150,000 visitors.