PARIS.- The Pompidou Centre is devoting an important exhibition to one of the major artists of the French post-war scene, Geneviève Asse, “painter of light and space”, now known as “bleu Asse”, the emblematic colour of this artist from Brittany.

The exhibition is organized around a donation made by the artist to the Pompidou Centre in 2012, composed of eleven paintings executed between 1948 and 1999, that make it possible to present her works at different stages in her artistic career. This series is completed by a selection of large-scale works, most of them belonging to national collections. A wide choice of sketch books painted from 1970 onwards, which have never been on display, also are included, together with a number of small-scale paintings, also presented for the first time.

In a staging that certainly arouses stimulating reflections on the notion of pictorial scale, the exhibition shows all the creative research of this artist through 68 works, from the first still lifes dating back to the 1940s to the rigorous abstractions of the 1990s, not forgetting her exploration of space rendered exclusively by the atmospheric vibrations of light, from the 1960s.

Geneviève Asse, who has regularly illustrated the works of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Yves Bonnefoy, Francis Ponge and Jorge Luis Borges, expresses the appearance of the world as a poet: “Behind the horizon, the dawn, shaded greys, transparent blue-black ultramarines, whites that disappear into the grain of the canvas, nothing from the exterior except for time” (Working Notes, 1974).

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue jointly published by the Éditions du Centre Pompidou and the Éditions Somogy, under the direction of Christian Briend, Curator of the Department of Graphic Arts at the National Museum of Modern Art/Centre for Industrial Creation (MNAM-CCI) and Curator of the Exhibition.