Aurelie Nemours: Espace Bleue (1959)

Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005): Espace Bleue
 
Silkscreen print on cardboard
31.5 x 25.0 cm
Edition of 150 by Panderma & Carl Laszlo, Basel
 
Condition: some spots on the blue field due to humidity
 
Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005) was one of the foremost figures of French geometric abstraction and concrete art. Born in Paris, she trained at the École du Louvre from 1929 and, in 1941, at the Académie André Lhote, before working in the studio of Fernand Léger — an apprenticeship that sharpened her sense of structure while leaving room for the sensuous materiality of paint. Profoundly influenced by De Stijl and neoplasticism, she established her mature language around 1949, devoting herself to the relationships between line, right angle, point and coloured plane.
 
For Nemours, colour was "pure energy," and the square became her ideal emblem of universal harmony. Working in rigorous series, she pared her vocabulary down to horizontals and verticals, rectangles and ultimately the square, pursuing a meditative balance in which rhythm and silence carry an almost spiritual charge. She was also a poet — her collection "Midi la lune" appeared in 1950 — and from 1949 to 1992 she was a constant presence at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris.
 
Her work was honoured with a major retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2004 and later included in the landmark exhibition "Women in Abstraction" (Centre Pompidou, 2021). "Espace Bleue", a silkscreen published in an edition of 150 by Panderma and Carl Laszlo in Basel, distils her central concerns: a single luminous blue field held in precise tension with the surrounding geometry, turning restraint into contemplative space.