Simon Hantaï left his native Hungary with his wife Zsuzsa in 1948 to settle in Paris. He exhibited very quickly with the American painters Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, then at André Breton's À L'Étoile scellée gallery. If he then distances himself from surrealism, he maintains the search for a blind painting as a method, in which chance reveals what is buried. In the 50s, the painter's gesture determined the border between dark and light, secret and revealed on the canvas.
Then, with the first Mariales, he painted on the surface of a crumpled canvas, letting the forms arise out of control, in random folds. This pictorial invention makes the canvas an active material, in equal parts with the painter. He opens a path in which young artists rush in search of new means for painting. Defending by the Jean Fournier Gallery, Simon Hantaï becomes the center of gravity of an entire generation of artists, at a time when painting must reinvent itself in the face of the emergence of new practices. It was during his stay in Varengeville-sur-Mer in 1963 that the Catamurons series was born. Entrenched in near silence since 1982, the year he made the decision to stop producing, he died in 2008.
Between 2009 and 2016, twelve paintings by Simon Hantaï joined the Gandur Foundation for Art. This extraordinary voice responds to the belief that the artist, although still largely unknown, is one of the essential figures in the revival of abstract art postwar. Within the collection, Simon Hantaï's paintings compete in number and importance with those of Martin Barré and Jean Degottex, two contemporary corpora brought together with the same concern for quality and representativeness.
