Claude Viallat valuation
French painter of Supports/Surfaces who has repeated one simple shape across unstretched canvas and fabric since the 1960s.
Claude Viallat was born in Nîmes in 1936 and grew up in Aubais, a village with a strong tradition of bull-rearing.
What a work by Claude Viallat is worth
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Bio
Claude Viallat was born in Nîmes in 1936 and grew up in Aubais, a village with a strong tradition of bull-rearing. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier from 1955, did military service in Algeria from 1958 to 1961, and then went to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he discovered the American painting of Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Sam Francis and Mark Rothko. By 1963 he had turned to abstraction, and in the mid-1960s, teaching in Nice, he began working systematically with a single shape repeated across canvas without a stretcher, a method he has kept ever since. He was a leading figure of Supports/Surfaces, the movement that set out to take apart the conventions of painting, and he showed with the Paris dealer Jean Fournier for nearly thirty years.
His works on unstretched canvas and other fabrics are meant to hang loose, and creases, folds and the character of the cloth are part of them, though tears and later damage should be noted. Labels from exhibitions and the gallery that sold the work help to date it.
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