Claire Tabouret
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. 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. She was commissioned to design new doors 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.
If you own a work by Claire Tabouret
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.