Gerard Fromanger
Painted the street in flat silhouette and pure colour, from May 1968 onwards.
Gerard Fromanger was born near Paris in 1939 and was working in Giacometti's orbit as a very young man before finding his own position in Narrative Figuration, the French answer to Pop that insisted painting could still carry a political argument. In May 1968 he made silkscreened posters in the occupied Beaux-Arts studios, and the work that followed used photographs — often taken by Elie Kagan or by the artist — projected and traced, then filled with flat, arbitrary, saturated colour, so that a crowd on a boulevard becomes a field of red, orange and violet silhouettes. He collaborated with Godard and with Deleuze and Foucault, and died in 2021.
The market is principally French and has strengthened since the retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2016. Large acrylics on canvas from the Boulevard des Italiens and Le Desir series lead. Fromanger also produced substantial print output, much of it screenprint, and the political posters of 1968 are a collecting field of their own, distinct from the editions. The paint is flat, matt acrylic on a white ground, so surface abrasion and any past varnish are readily apparent and matter.
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