Claire Tabouret valuation
Paints groups of children and dressed-up figures on grounds that glow through the surface.
Claire Tabouret was born at Pertuis in France in 1981, trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and has worked in Los Angeles since 2015.
What a work by Claire Tabouret is worth
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Bio
Claire Tabouret was born at Pertuis in France in 1981, trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and has worked in Los Angeles since 2015. The paintings usually begin from a found photograph — a school group, a costume party, a debutante line-up, a family in fancy dress — worked in acrylic over a saturated coloured ground that is left visible through the figures, so the picture appears lit from behind. Her subjects are almost always people caught between roles: children in adult clothing, dressed-up figures whose costumes are not quite convincing. In 2024 she won the competition to design new stained-glass windows for Notre-Dame in Paris.
A market that developed rapidly through gallery sales and moved into the auction rooms sharply in the late 2010s and early 2020s, with some volatility since; provenance and acquisition date are more relevant here than for a settled market. Large unique acrylics on canvas lead. The luminous ground is achieved with thin acrylic over an unvarnished coloured layer and cannot be cleaned or varnished without destroying the effect, so condition matters. Works on paper and small print editions are the accessible part of the output.
Notre-Dame, the Grand Palais and Voorlinden
The six new windows for Notre-Dame replace nineteenth-century glass by Viollet-le-Duc that survived the 2019 fire. Her designs, with full-size models and studies, were shown at the Grand Palais in 2025 in D'un seul souffle (In a Single Breath), and the Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands gave her a retrospective, Weaving Waters, Weaving Gestures, from January to May 2026.
Earlier exhibitions include The Dance of Icarus at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai in 2017, and her work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. A painting is identified by its title, date and the gallery's invoice or certificate, which should stay with it.
Makeup, the Villa Medici and the Yovanovitch chapel
The Makeup paintings, begun in 2015, show girls and young women with cosmetics smeared across their faces, the smears recalling a child's first attempts at painting. In 2017 she showed with Yoko Ono at the Villa Medici in Rome in One Day I Broke a Mirror, painting seated groups of women facing out, and the same year she covered the inside walls of a chapel on Pierre Yovanovitch's estate with a crowd of children in costume.
For a two-part exhibition in Picasso's studio and at Almine Rech she painted wrestlers and couples dancing, the struggle and the harmony standing for her own feelings about the painter whose space she was answering. Her work was in Present Generations at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2021, a show of gifts that founded the museum's Scantland Collection, and in Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2022.
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