Martial Raysse

Martial Raysse (b. 1936, Golfe-Juan, France) is a French artist and founding figure of the Nouveau Réalisme movement, organized by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960 alongside Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and others. He lives and works in the South of France.

In the early 1960s, his neon-lit assemblages of found consumer goods and beach imagery — in saturated synthetic colours — were among the most exuberant works of the movement, proposing a French counterpart to American Pop Art while maintaining a distinctly Mediterranean sensibility. He participated in major group exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and was shown at the Venice Biennale (1966). From the late 1960s, dissatisfied with the commercialization of the art world, he withdrew from gallery exhibition for nearly two decades, devoting himself to film and to a progressive return to classical painting, reengaging the tradition of the Old Masters with his own chromatic and figurative vocabulary. His return to public exhibition from the mid-1980s revealed a practice that had deepened in solitude and refused the terms of his earlier international recognition.

Raysse is a major and historical figure of contemporary art in France and internationally whose work is held by the Centre Pompidou, Pinault Collection, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among other major collections. He has been the subject of a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2014, and of a solo exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi — Pinault Collection, Venice.