Robert Combas valuation
Founded Figuration Libre in a punk-adjacent France and filled every inch of the canvas.
Robert Combas was born at Lyon in 1957 and grew up in Sete, and in 1981 the artist Ben Vautier gave the name Figuration Libre to what he and Herve Di Rosa, Francois Boisrond and Remi Blanchard were doing — a fast, deliberately crude, comic-and-rock-driven painting that ran parallel to Neo-Expressionism in Germany and Graffiti art in New York.
What a work by Robert Combas is worth
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Bio
Robert Combas was born at Lyon in 1957 and grew up in Sete, and in 1981 the artist Ben Vautier gave the name Figuration Libre to what he and Herve Di Rosa, Francois Boisrond and Remi Blanchard were doing — a fast, deliberately crude, comic-and-rock-driven painting that ran parallel to Neo-Expressionism in Germany and Graffiti art in New York. Combas paints in thick black outline over flat colour, fills every part of the surface including the border, and takes his subjects from battles, saints, music, pop culture and sex, usually with a written title or commentary worked into the picture. He has also worked extensively in music and in sculpture.
Prices are led firmly by the early 1980s canvases, and the market distinguishes sharply between that period and the later output, which is very large. Acrylic on unstretched canvas or on found fabric is a common early format and stretching or later mounting affects both condition and value. The surfaces are matt, unvarnished and mark easily. There is a substantial print output and a quantity of drawings, and signature with a written title is normally present on the face of the work.
Finir en beauté and the Lyon retrospective
Through François Boisrond, Combas and Hervé Di Rosa met the critic Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, who in 1981 included them in Finir en beauté, an exhibition in his Paris loft with Jean-Michel Alberola, Jean-Charles Blais, Rémi Blanchard and others. It was for that exhibition that Ben Vautier named their painting Figuration Libre.
In 2012 the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon gave him his first major retrospective, Greatest Hits, which filled 3,000 square metres with work from the 1970s onwards, set to music from his own record collection. A painting is identified by its title, usually written on the face, and its date.
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.
