Opening Friday, October 11, London gallery Waddington Custot is presenting “Fabienne Verdier: Retables,” a solo exhibition featuring a selection of the French artist’s new work. Interrogating the fundamentals of painting itself, highlights of the show include pieces wherein Verdier departs from the traditional flat-canvas format and instead has created “winged altarpieces.” A play on the triptych canvas configuration, these paintings showcase the artist’s signature large-scale brushwork and bold yet understated abstractions.

Fabienne Verdier, Aux échelles du vent / On the wings of the wind (2024). Courtesy of Waddington Custot, London.

Coinciding with this exhibition at Waddington Custot, Paris-based Galerie Lelong will be presenting an exhibition on Verdier, featuring pieces from the same body of work, marking a truly international debut for the artist’s newest paintings.

Though Verdier (b. 1962) currently lives and works in France, her early career saw her studying art in China at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing—which ultimately led her to be the first woman from abroad to receive a post-graduate degree in fine arts from the institution. While there, she worked closely with some of the leading Chinese painters, many of whom were survivors of the Cultural Revolution, learning about their approaches to aesthetics as well as distinctive, spontaneous painting methods.

Fabienne Verdier, Passenger Of Silence: My Quest for the Ancient (Five Continents Editions: 2024). Photo: Fabienne Verdier Archive. Courtesy of the artist and Waddington Custot, London.

The continued influence of her studies in China are apparent in the work shown in “Retables,” where her sparse, emotive brushstrokes, achieved through the use of oversized brushes, recall calligraphic compositions. They also reflect the artist’s more recent interest in Western altarpieces, which began in 2022 at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar France, where she had received a commission that she dedicated to Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece from 1516. Subsequent trips to Florence, Italy, to study altarpieces and other historic multi-paneled paintings became a new starting point in her practice. As showcased in “Retables,” paneled paintings gleaming with gold leaf have become a fertile ground on which the artist has continued to explore the boundaries and language of abstraction.

Fabienne Verdier, Ode à la vie 1 / Ode to life 1 (2024). Courtesy of Waddington Custot, London.

Along with the two solo shows going on view, another important moment for the artist is the release of her newly translated memoir, Passenger of Silence, which will be available for the first time in English. Originally released in 2003, the book is a first-person telling of Verdier’s early life in France, but, more specifically, the considerable amount of time she spent living, working, and studying in China in the 1980s in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution.

Together, the two solo shows and re-release of her best-selling memoir mark a momentous moment in Verdier’s career, solidifying her place as one of the most important French artists working today.

Fabienne Verdier. Courtesy of Waddington Custot, London.

“Fabienne Verdier: Retables” is on view at Waddington Custot, London, October 11–November 9, 2024.