Aurelie Nemours: L'Arbre (1990)

Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005): L'Arbre (1990)
 
Original serigraph in 4 colours on heavy paper. Hand-signed in pencil in the lower right margin, marked "E.A." in the lower left corner. Stamped "Edizione Dabbeni Lugano" in the lower left.
 
Dimensions: sheet 65 x 48 cm / image 55 x 38 cm
 
Condition: very good condition
 
Artist's proof (épreuve d'artiste) outside the edition of 100. Created by the artist in 1990 for an exhibition at the Galleria Dabbeni, Lugano, Switzerland.
 
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. She was also a poet, publishing her collection "Midi la lune" in 1950.
 
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. 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). "L'Arbre" ("The Tree") translates her reductive vocabulary into four clear colours, holding austerity and lyricism in the same quiet, exacting equilibrium that defines her art.