Thierry Lefort - Expo 2022 - Château de Sannes

Exhibition presented by Yoyo Maeght

For the exhibition at the Château de Sannes , Thierry Lefort takes us into the light of Cézanne but under the California sun where shadows, palm trees and electric poles punctuate the space. Two techniques complement each other, oil painting on canvas and ink on paper. On the border between figuration and abstraction, Thierry Lefort likes to assemble elements to arrive at a composition. For the Château de Sannes, and as a nod to the vine, he created large inks by assembling three leaves of a size called grape format. All the works presented here are being exhibited for the first time.

Thierry Lefort is a French artist who lives and works between Paris and Los Angeles. From his youth, painting has been his means of expression to understand the world, its light, its colors and its beauty. An admirer of Cézanne, he applies his credo according to which “painting from nature is not slavishly copying, it is realizing one's sensations” .

Thierry Lefort's painting is not devoid of a spirituality sometimes encountered in other cultures. From 1997 to 2000, he traveled through the province of Henan in China, the cradle of Chinese civilization and kungfu. Then, it was through calligraphy and inspired by China and Japan, that he further developed his pictorial art by seeking to paint in an efficient, powerful and refined manner. From then on, Thierry Lefort moved towards a painting that some would describe as the Renaissance of Figuration , with all that this entails of simplicity, elegance and purity.

The strength and particularity of Thierry Lefort lie not only in his technique but also in his rereading of the world around him, in particular the industrial and urban world. He sometimes paints his paintings in situ, in the street, taking an enthusiastic look at places as diverse and innocuous as stations, factories, bridges, parking lots. The human seems absent, yet we suspect it.

Make no mistake, Thierry Lefort does not seek to deliver a faithful image of the setting, the landscapes or the cities that he paints, with him it is not the Painting that serves the landscape, but the landscape which serves the Painting, to achieve the perfect balance of the composition.

Notable venues that have presented the works of Thierry Lefort include the Palais Constantin in Saint Petersburg, Russia and, twice, the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Japan.

In 2021, Yoyo Maeght is devoting a major exhibition to him in Paris which will be followed in the fall of 2022 by a new exhibition of large-format paintings.

Yoyo Maeght designs and organizes exhibitions internationally, notably for the Maeght Foundation, created by his grandfather Aimé Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, but also for the Center Pompidou, the Yokohama Museum in Japan, the Beijing Imperial Museum in China, the Pera Museum in Istanbul in Turkey, the Pinacoteca de San Paolo in Brazil. She is also a publisher of limited edition prints. She wrote the best-seller La Saga Maeght.

Works exhibited

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