François Morellet

François Morellet was a French contemporary abstract painter, sculptor, and light artist. His early work prefigured minimal art and conceptual art and he played a prominent role in the development of geometrical abstract art and post-conceptual art.

Morellet began to make still-life paintings at the age of 14 as he studied Russian literature in Paris. After completing his studies, he returned to Cholet in 1948, where he continued to paint, now in the spirit of the COBRA movement. After this short period of figurative/representational work, Morellet turned to abstraction in 1950 after encountering the Concrete art of Max Bill. Morellet then adopted a pictorial language of simple geometric forms: lines, squares and triangles assembled into two-dimensional compositions.

In 1960, he was one of the founders of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV), with fellow artists Francisco Sobrino, Horatio Garcia-Rossi, Hugo DeMarco, Julio Le Parc, Jean-Pierre Yvaral (the son of Victor Vasarely), Joël Stein, Vera Molnár and François Molnár (the last two left the group shortly after). Morellet began at this time to work with neon tube lighting.

From the 1960s on, Morellet worked in various materials (fabric, tape, neon, walls...) and in doing so investigated the use of the exhibition space in terms similar to artists of installation art and environmental art. He gained an international reputation, especially in Germany and France, and he was commissioned to create work for public and private collections in Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and the U.S. One of his works is part of the permanent collection of the Centre for International Light Art (CILA) in Unna, Germany. In 2016/2017, the CILA staged a retrospective of Morellet's Light Art, the last exhibition to be curated by the artist himself, shortly before his death in May 2016.

Morellet's abstract ideal was, he said, tempered by the charming nihilism of Marcel Duchamp. For him, a work of art referred only to itself.

His titles are generally sophisticated, show some Duchampian word play, and describe the "constraints" or "rules" that he used to create them. Like other contemporary artists who use constraints and chance (or the aleatory) in their works, such as John Cage in music and the Oulipo group in literature, Morellet used rules and constraints established in advance to guide the creation of his works while also allowing chance to play a role in some of his compositions. This dialectic between the rigid rule-based procedure and chance situates his work within the Post-conceptual art category.

His rigorous use of geometry tends to create emotionally neutral work, and also placed him close to Minimal art and Conceptual art in his aims. He shared a particular affinity to the American artists Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt.

Series: Répartitions aléatoires ("Chance divisions") from the 1950s

Répartition de 16 formes identiques - painted after his visit to the Alhambra of Granada

Series: Trames from the 1950s

Series: Désintégrations architecturales ("Architectural disintegrations") from 1971

Series: Géométrées from 1983

Series: Défigurations from 1988

Series: Déclinaisons de pi ("Versions of pi") from 1998Album de 10 sérigraphies sur 10 ans (1952-1961), François Morellet, 1975, Musée Groninger

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023