The Elkon Gallery is pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Vicky Colombet entitled Face au Soleil. With a career spanning over three decades, Colombet’s paintings, works on paper, photography, and architectural glass installations exist in conversation with various art historical movements from traditional Chinese Painting to Abstract Expressionism.
Colombet’s singular approach to painting is a rich experimentation with natural pigments, including the weight of the material, granulation, chemical response, and their specific vibrations when grinding. For Colombet, pigments represent the forces of the universe as she creates parallels of energy between the particles and the physical movements of the brushstrokes. The use of pure pigment gives a unique vibration and emotional resonance. “My paintings are non-objective”, Colombet says “but they come from a place where abstraction and nature meet”. Not only inspired by nature in the end result, but also in every step of the process.
“When the Musée Marmottan Monet contacted me about the upcoming show Face au Soleil and asked me to choose a painting representing the sun in dialogue with the iconic Monet’s Impression Sunrise, I immediately thought of starting a new painting that would feel like a heartbeat, a pulse. From this concept, I began working more and more on developing a new series of paintings that are part of the show now at The Elkon Gallery. The representation of the sun is the theme of the Musée Marmottan Monet museum show Face au Soleil. But what I wanted to convey is beyond representation, what we feel when we face the sun. The warmth, the vibration, and the blindness we experience”. - Vicky Colombet, October 2022
Colombet was born in Paris, France in 1953 and currently lives and works in New York City. She maintains a studio in Paris and at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. As well, she has a large studio in the Hudson Valley, where she spends most of her time.
Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the Recipient of the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant (2014).